It Is Time to Bring Private Markets Into America’s 401(k)s
The DOL’s proposed safe-harbor for private assets in DC plans is an opportunity to bring useful exposure into DC plans carefully, professionally and at scale. The question is no longer whether private markets belong in retirement portfolios; our analysis demonstrates that the case for including them is compelling — simply based on the numbers.
Used prudently within professionally managed, diversified vehicles, private-market exposure can be one tool for helping address the retirement savings gap facing many American workers.
Using the 20-year actuarial capital market assumptions of the 2025 Horizon Actuarial Services Survey, which aggregates data from 41 major investment firms, we have modeled a correlated 10,000-trial Monte Carlo simulation where a 25-year-old makes $1,000 monthly contributions over 40 years in two portfolios. Put more simply, we ran 10,000 possible market scenarios to compare how the same saver might fare over a full working career depending on whether their retirement account included private-market investments or stayed entirely in traditional public markets.