Morningstar survey: U.S. advisor optimism falls to 36% as private-market offerings reach 40%

The share of U.S. advisors calling themselves optimistic about markets fell to 36% this year from 44% in 2025, and the worry that did most to move it is one portfolio managers can hedge only awkwardly: half of the more than 500 advisors in Morningstar's 2026 Investor Perspectives survey named geopolitical tensions their top market concern, up from 37% a year earlier, with inflation at 44% and the prospect of an economic downturn at 35%. The study, fielded as part of a larger multi-country effort, is a mood gauge first, but it also records how peers spend their hours and how far they have moved toward private-market offerings—the part a practice can act on.

Tariff and trade-policy worries, the widest swing among concerns the survey reported in both years, fell to 14% of advisors from 41%, and the coverage does not say where those respondents went. The tariff question may have been settled in their minds, folded into the geopolitical worry that rose 13 points, or simply pushed aside by a year in which other risks crowded the agenda—the last reading is the least flattering and the most ordinary, because a survey of this kind measures what is salient in the weeks it is fielded and salience moves.

U.S. advisors also read as gloomier than their peers abroad, where optimism among surveyed advisors in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia ranged from 59% to 63%, leaving the U.S. figure 23 points below the least optimistic of those three. The domestic mood was not despondent: 37% called themselves steady, 21% uncertain and 7% nervous, and Morningstar's senior director of market research, Joe Agostinelli, described the shift as a matter of degree. "Advisors, for the most part, are still feeling steady or optimistic," he said, "but they are a little less optimistic than they were in 2025, and they are a little more uncertain."

The time ledger is where the survey comes closest to portfolio construction: advisors report spending 27% of their hours on investment strategy, the same share as in 2025, but say they would rather spend 23% there, 14% on operational and strategic initiatives and more than 60% on client relationships. The four-point gap between actual and preferred is not enormous, but it points in one direction: evaluating investments is not where most advisors want the week to go.

Demand of that shape runs toward outsourcing—model portfolios, third-party manager research, a platform's due-diligence shelf—because four points of investment-strategy time have to be bought back from somewhere. That is the market the outsourced-CIO and model-portfolio businesses exist to serve, and it is also why this survey lands with some tension for the firms that supply both the models and the private-market vehicles: the hours an advisor is trying to reclaim are the hours those products are sold into.

The share of advisors who offer private-market investment options did rise, though the pipeline behind it thinned: 40% of respondents say they offer such options to clients, up from 35% in 2025, while the share who plan to add them slipped to 5% from 8% and the 55% reporting no plans held roughly steady. Those three answers appear to account for the full sample between them, which makes the arithmetic worth sitting with—the level moved up five points while the queue at the door lost three.

That pattern suggests the increase sits with firms already committed to the category rather than spreading across the field, though a three-point move on an intent question is well within the ordinary year-to-year noise of a survey of this size. What the survey does not say is how much of a client's assets those 40% place in private markets: offering an interval fund or a private-credit sleeve is a different act from building an allocation with a stated reason for the illiquidity, the fee load and the redemption terms, and the survey measures the first thing. The 55% with no plans at all are the more striking group—more than half the field has decided against the category, which is a harder number to wave away than an offering rate, and a useful one for an advisor to have an answer for.

The line to watch in next year's survey is intent: if the offering share holds near 40% while the pipeline stays thin, private markets will look like a settled feature of a large minority of practices rather than the leading edge of a broad rebuild of client portfolios. Geopolitical tension, named by half the field as the top concern, is the harder item on the list to do anything about—no allocation removes it, which leaves the work in the place advisors already say they want to spend their time.