Hi {{first_name}},

I've spent a lot of this newsletter's run arguing that the biggest gap between institutional investors and everyone else is access. Minimums, lockups, and gatekeepers decide what retail investors can buy.

TIGER 21 Members clear every one of those barriers. Every quarter, they publish what almost 2,000 people worth at least $20 million each are doing with their money, data drawn straight from their own reported portfolios. I read every one of these reports the day it drops. This one stopped me.

Cash and equivalents = 7%. That's the lowest reading in the nineteen years TIGER 21 has been tracking the allocation.

TIGER 21's own founder has described Members as living on roughly 2% of their net worth, holding cash to cover about five years of expenses. That's their own rule of thumb. Even against that standard, 7% is a thin number. This is a decision made independently, more than a thousand times over, to hold less than their own framework would suggest.

Twenty million dollars means nothing stops them from buying whatever they want. The average Member's net worth is $140 million, so this isn't a group straining against a minimum. This issue looks at what they actually choose to hold, and what that says about your own cash.

— Walker Deibel
WSJ & USA Today Bestselling Author of Buy Then Build
Founder, Build Wealth

Cash is supposed to be the safe bet. Put more aside and you sleep better. Yet the wealthiest investors — the ones who can buy pretty much anything — are holding less cash than at any point in the nineteen years the record has been tracked. And they walked it down there straight through the two events most likely to send anyone running the other way. The crash and the pandemic each let a little caution sneak back in, but neither turned the trend around.

TIGER 21, whose membership stands around 2,000 entrepreneurs and investors, has a steep admission of at least $20 million in investable assets or net worth. Since 2007, members have laid out their entire portfolio once a year in a session called Portfolio Defense, and TIGER 21 rolls those into a quarterly Asset Allocation Report. The Q2 2026 release put cash and equivalents at 7%, the lowest the report has ever recorded. Private equity is at 34%, the largest single holding, up six points year over year. Public equities came in at 25%, the highest in over two years; real estate at 23%, a continuing slow decline; and hedge funds at 1%.

Cash fell to 7% because it moved, and the largest share of it seems to have landed in private equity. The lowest cash reading on record and the highest private equity reading on record are one decision seen from both ends.

The Trend That Kept Coming Back

Each TIGER 21 release represents a trailing twelve months, with roughly a twelfth of the membership reporting in any given month. That keeps a handful of members having a hot year from distorting the whole picture. The years behind this quarter's numbers moved through real reversals.

The financial crisis (2008) and pandemic (2020) each interrupted this pattern a bit, and each time capital reversed briefly before returning to the same direction it left, sustained by independent decisions from well over a thousand people who each spent years building the wealth that qualifies them to make the call.

The Gatekeepers Were the Problem

Most portfolio advice never gets past one question: how do I spread this around so nothing hurts too much?

That's diversification for the sake of diversification — risk sanded down until everything feels nice and even. And it's about where financial education ends. Level 2 investing, achieved. It's also where you land by default when access is the thing holding you back. Minimums, lockups, and gatekeepers herd ordinary portfolios into public markets and cash, because those are the only two things anyone can buy on a given Tuesday.

Twenty million dollars opens every one of those locked doors — a private fund, a direct deal, a real estate syndication. So members built a system: cash trimmed to whatever job it still does, public equities kept as the layer that sells in a hurry, private equity stacked as the layer that compounds.

Level 3 is deciding what each asset is for, then sizing it to that job.

And 34% spread this way is a different animal from 34% in one stock. A single stock is one company's fate. Private equity at this scale runs across hundreds of funds, operators, and industries — capital committed to owning and steering businesses rather than sitting liquid.

There Was a Year Private Equity Nearly Disappeared

TIGER 21 began tracking member allocations in 2007 — one year, as it happened, before the financial crisis hit.

By early 2008, private equity had collapsed to 9% of the average portfolio. Less than 10 cents on the dollar. That 9% is the number to hold onto. It's the floor — the year private equity nearly dropped out of these portfolios altogether. Every other figure in this issue, including today's record 34%, is a measure of how far it climbed from there.

Public equities told a different story. By the first quarter of 2009, roughly the market's bottom, they had climbed to around 27% of member portfolios. That likely reflected two things at once: private holdings losing relative value, and members buying into a public market that had just been cut in half.

Private equity, meanwhile, spent the next several years digging out. It reached 14% by 2012 and 15% by 2013. A slow, grinding recovery from a position that had come close to disappearing from the portfolio entirely.

And while private equity was rebuilding, real estate climbed through the same stretch without the same scare and became the portfolio's largest holding for most of the decade that followed — a spot private equity wouldn't seriously challenge until the 2020s.

The Rotation That Almost Stuck

Private equity kept climbing through the 2010s, hitting a then-record 23% by 2016 and holding there through 2018 — still behind real estate's 26%. Then two shocks arrived close together.

Cash spiked to 19% in 2020 as members reacted to the pandemic. Then markets recovered hard through 2021, and private equity gave back real ground — falling to 22% while public equities passed it for the first time in three years, 25% to 22%, with real estate still on top at 27%. Anyone holding a serious private equity position that quarter was watching a decade of conviction lose an argument in real time: four points surrendered in three months, to the exact asset class it had spent ten years pulling capital away from.

It kept going. By the first quarter of 2022, public equities had climbed to 27% — their highest since the 2009 bottom — overtaking real estate for the first time in over a decade, as real estate posted back-to-back quarterly declines. For roughly a year, this looked like unconstrained capital rotating out of both real estate and private equity, into liquid public markets, riding the recovery.

Then it reversed, dramatically. Private equity surged to 31%, which was a nine-point swing off its 2021 low, and an all-time high at the time. Public equities fell back to 22%. Real estate settled at 24% and never regained the top spot it had held for a decade. 

Private equity eased to 28–29% through 2023 and 2024, then pushed to 34% today.

So is 34% just another peak?

It's a fair question, and the 2021–22 reversal is what proved this trend can turn, and turn fast, in under twelve months. But you’ll need to look at what the reversals did. 

Each one ran through a significant market shock — a financial crisis in 2008, and a full market recovery in 2021 — and each time private equity came out higher than it went in. The 9% became 34%. Twenty-two percent, hit in the middle of an active rotation with public equities ahead and real estate still on top, became 34% three years later. 

Real estate never recovered from its slow decline. But private equity turned its worst quarter in three years into the launchpad for a record. 

Every dollar in cash is doing one of three jobs. So if you are just treating all your dollars as one lump sum, that’s how cash becomes the largest unmanaged position in a portfolio. 

Auditing for each dollar’s function is fairly easy.  It comes down to identifying what is needed for each of the three jobs. Think of them as buckets that need to be assigned.  

1. Near-term reserve. 

Three to twelve months of known expenses and obligations, sized to an actual number. Keep it in cash.

2. Committed capital. 

Money earmarked for a capital call, a closing, or a deal you've already decided to fund in the next twelve months, cash with a job. Keep it too.

3. Everything else. 

No name attached to it, no date attached to it, sitting there because moving it felt like a decision and not moving it didn't. Most readers already have a rough sense of how much of their cash lives here before they even run the math. This is the exact position TIGER 21 Members have spent nineteen years shrinking to a record low.

Add up buckets one and two. Whatever's left of your total cash is bucket three, the unmanaged pile. Most readers are surprised how big it is. If it's the largest of the three, that's a habit wearing a reserve's clothing.

Bucket Three’s Assignment

Private markets are more accessible to everyday accredited investors than they've ever been. SEC accredited investor status requires $1 million in net worth excluding a primary residence, or $200,000 in individual income (or $300,000 joint) in each of the last two years. Most of our readers already clear that bar. Access is the easy part. What you do with it is the real question.

You have three moves, and this is the order to make them:

1. Name the function before you name the fund. For each dollar in bucket three, decide what role it should play before deciding what to buy:

A dollar without an assigned role is a dollar that defaults back to cash the next time markets get loud.

2. Size the move to the reserve. Steady increments over quarters, the way TIGER 21's data implies — not in one dramatic reallocation.

3. Recheck the audit every time cash rebuilds. Distributions, bonuses, a liquidity event, they all refill bucket three between one audit and the next. Run the same three questions again: reserve, committed, or inertia.

The report's number moved because for nineteen years many of the Members ran this exact audit and acted on what they found, one quarter at a time. Yours moves the same way, or it doesn't move at all.

"There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune."
— Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

TIGER 21 members took the tide three times, out of a financial crisis, a pandemic, and a rally that pulled everyone else back to public stocks, and each time it left them holding less cash than before. What's left once nothing forces the choice reveals what you actually think money is for. 

Your own bucket three is the same question, though smaller. What is that cash doing right now, and would you notice if it stopped?

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This is not financial advice. Illustrative output of a reasoned thought experiment. Not a backtest, guarantee, or prospectus. Actual results vary based on market conditions, fund selection, timing, fees, taxes, and factors not modeled. Private credit, CRE, and leveraged strategies involve significant risk including loss of principal. Consult a qualified financial advisor.