An op-ed in Financial Planning lays out 90/10 at $1 million and a private-markets carve-out at $10 million

The client who has just crossed a million dollars tends to want a piece of every asset class they have heard about—private equity, real estate and energy among them—and the advisor's temptation is to accommodate.

An op-ed in Financial Planning argues that is the mistake: adding complexity before the math supports it, so a household with $1 million should not be handed the same advice as one with $10 million. The column is written from the client side by an investor who describes a middle-class upbringing and businesses built and investments made until he was overseeing billions of dollars of commercial real estate transactions, a résumé offered as evidence that he has progressed through all three tiers of wealth the piece treats. What follows is unusually specific for an opinion column, and it lands on the portfolio desk's own question: what goes into the account at each rung, and what stays out.

At $1 million the allocation is nearly a two-line model—90% S&P 500 and 10% cash—with the author allowing that the specifics move with time horizon but arguing that nothing fancier than a quality index fund and a cash reserve earns its place there; the index compounds the money with minimal risk while the cash supplies security and optionality at once. The job at this level is accumulation: compound and wait, as the column puts it.

What gives that allocation its edge is what it leaves out: bonds are absent, and the op-ed is blunt about why—they no longer offer competitive yield or effective diversification, the two properties that once made them useful, so defense passes to the cash line. That is a portfolio-construction claim that remains open to debate, and it is the sharpest sentence in the piece because it discards the asset that fills the defensive slot in most standard models. The column does not carry the supporting analysis—no yield comparison, no spending rate—that would let a reader test the substitution, and an advisor would want that before adopting it wholesale.

By the time a client reaches $10 million, the op-ed's job description becomes selective growth: the S&P 500 stays the anchor, the 10% cash line stays as what the author calls a final hedge of protection, but a household at this level can peel 20% to 30% out of the steady core and reach for higher upside.

The carve-out is where the two tiers diverge most and where the column is thinnest on mechanics: 20 to 30% arrives as a rule of thumb with no study behind it in the published text, one investor's number drawn from his own passage through the tiers rather than from outcomes measured across a population of households. An advisor borrowing it would be importing a target from a column, not from a mandate. The direction of the advice is the part worth registering: at $10 million the model stops defending a balance sheet and starts spending a measured share of it on upside.

Here private equity and venture capital become real options, though the author concedes that the S&P 500 will outperform most individual private equity bets and locates the case for the asset class somewhere narrower—in a skilled manager spreading across 30 to 50 companies where the winners can carry the zeros that will inevitably be among them. The downside remains; the claim is that a $10 million balance sheet can absorb it. The sleeve is sized to the household's capacity to wait out its bad outcomes, which runs under every recommendation in the column.

For clients drawn to the exposure but not to the lockup, the piece points to venture and late-stage private equity ETFs as a liquid entry point, placed under a dedicated private equity manager and called a starting position for clients not ready to tie up capital for five to 10 years. That ranking raises a question the column leaves open: whether the liquid vehicle delivers the exposure the illiquid version is bought for, or something adjacent to it—for an advisor who has to justify the sleeve in a meeting, that distinction is the whole conversation.

The title points at $100 million, and the author's three tiers run $1 million, $10 million and $100 million, but the allocation detail in the published extract stops at the $10 million rung; the top tier is named and otherwise left alone, so whatever the column makes of the first $100 million sits outside the guidance on offer.

An advisor reading for the numbers will take two—the 90/10 at $1 million and the 20% to 30% carve-out at $10 million—but the test underneath both is simpler than either of them, whether a sleeve has been earned by the math or added because the client asked and the asset class sounds serious. The line that survives from one tier to the next, unchanged and unglamorous, is the same 10% in cash.