Operational Alpha Vol. 1 — The Retail Private Fund Revolution

Vol. 1 of Operational Alpha — the no-nonsense playbook for private markets ops in 2026 and beyond.

Private markets aren’t private anymore. The SEC killed the 15% rule in May. Retail money is flooding in. Everyone sees the opportunity. Most still don’t see the trap.

Right now there are 304 interval and tender funds running $252 billion in AUM (XA Investments, Q3 2025). Credit owns ~$89 billion of it. Private equity has ~$65 billion white space. Real estate is cooling fast at ~$27 billion while capital chases yield and liquidity.

Demand is there. The operations to handle it are not.

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The Structural Divide – Quick Cheat Sheet

Interval funds are the hardest to run right and the easiest to blow up wrong. Tender funds look simple until an advisor asks for intra-quarter transparency and you’ve got nothing. Evergreens feel great until you realize every new subscriber needs a fair price calculated yesterday.

Intermediaries Are the New LPs

RIAs, wealth platforms, and aggregators now decide who eats. They want daily pricing, clean data feeds, and the fund to show up on a Schwab or Fidelity statement like any other holding.

Getting on CAIS, iCapital, Bite, or AltsEdge isn’t marketing anymore. It’s survival. And none of them will touch you unless your NAV, liquidity schedule, and reporting are bulletproof.

A second wave of marketplaces is already rising too — newer players that combine distribution, data, and direct investor access in one place. The bar is about to get even higher.

The Infrastructure Gap Most GPs Ignore

Launching a registered retail vehicle costs $500K–$1M in year one and usually needs $100M AUM to break even. That’s before you pay the fund admin, valuation agent, transfer agent, auditor, and the platforms.

Treat infrastructure as an afterthought and you’re dead before the first close. In this game, infrastructure is distribution.

Why This Matters Right Now

Institutional capital is saturated. The next trillion (yes, trillion) is coming from wealth channels. The winners won’t be the managers with the sexiest pitchbook. They’ll be the ones who make illiquid assets feel liquid, transparent, and boringly reliable.

That takes three things most shops still don’t have

1. Daily NAV discipline
2. Real-time reporting that doesn’t lie
3. Operations that don’t gate when markets crack

How Alt360 Fits

We automate the hard parts: NAV workflows, compliance checks, direct custodian feeds, and clean advisor-facing data. One dashboard. No spreadsheets. No 3 a.m. panic calls to the administrator.

The retail private fund revolution is already here. It just hasn’t been evenly distributed yet.

The ones who fix operations first will own it.

Drop your biggest ops headache in the comments – I read every one.

 This is Vol. 1 of Operational Alpha — a short series on the ops architecture that actually wins in 2026.

Next: From Quarterly to Daily NAVs.

After that: advisor enablement, 90-day launch kits, and how the middle office becomes the new moat.