Since the start of 2026, a new acronym has entered the private markets lexicon: HALO. Coined by Josh Brown of Ritholtz Wealth management, the idea spread quickly through the asset management and financial media spaces.1 HALO—Hard Assets, Low Obsolescence—captured something advisors may have already sensed: that in an age of accelerating technological disruption, the assets least likely to be replaced might be the most physical ones.
But, until now, the conversation has stayed almost entirely in public markets. HALO has been a story about energy stocks, industrial names, and logistics companies, equities an advisor can screen and buy by market close. What has gone largely unremarked is that the same rotation is underway in private markets, and the fundraising data is making it visible in real time.
That may be a useful story for advisors. Not whether the HALO thesis is real, and the capital flows are suggesting it is, but how they might access it through private markets.
What Does HALO Investing Actually Describe?
The HALO framework inverts a piece of conventional wisdom held for most of the last decade. Physical assets like factories, real estate, and energy infrastructure were long treated as the obsolescence risk in a portfolio. They were the things that could be stranded by a changing economy: the mall emptied by e-commerce; the office tower hollowed out by remote work; the power plant rendered obsolete by the energy transition.
The asset-light businesses, by contrast, were supposed to be the future. Software and platforms required little physical capital, scaled more easily, and commanded premium valuations.
HALO argues the risk has shifted. The thesis holds that in a world where artificial intelligence can increasingly replicate intangible work, some asset-light business models may face greater obsolescence pressure than they once did. What AI cannot replicate, on the other hand, is the physical world it depends on. It can’t build a power grid, pour a foundation, or move a shipping container. By this logic, the hard assets that were once viewed as obsolescence risks start to look more durable.
Infrastructure Growth Outpaced Every Other Asset Class
The clearest evidence sits in the fundraising data. Across North American private markets, capital raised remains below its 2021–2022 peak, and the recovery has been uneven across asset classes. Infrastructure has stood apart (Exhibit 1).2
Infrastructure fundraising hit a record high in 2025, leading the major private markets asset classes (Exhibit 1)
North American private infrastructure funds raised roughly $115 billion in 2025, the asset class’s highest annual total and a sharp rebound from a subdued 2024. Over the 2020 to 2025 period, infrastructure compounded at nearly 14% a year, well ahead of private equity, private debt, and real estate over the same span.3 Private real estate, after a multi-year stretch of high-rate headwinds, also turned higher in 2025, thought it’s the essential, long-lease corners of the market that fit the HALO frame, not the malls and offices the thesis casts as obsolescence risk. Triple net lease assets, where tenants commit to critical-use properties under long-term agreements, are one example. We can see a pattern emerging: the two pillars of the HALO trade are where private capital has been flowing.
Why Capital Is Rotating Into Real Assets
A single strong year would be a data point, not a thesis. What makes the HALO rotation worth an advisor’s attention is that the demand behind it is structural, driven by forces that operate on timelines measured in decades, not quarters.
Three are worth naming:
The first is the state of physical infrastructure itself. Decades of underinvestment have left roads, grids, water systems, and transport of networks in need of sustained capital, and the scale of that need far exceeds what the public sector can fund alone. Estimates of the global infrastructure investment required through 2040 run into the tens of trillions of dollars, more than public budgets alone are likely to cover, leaving private capital to fill much of the difference.4
The second is AI, not as a competitor to physical assets but as one of their largest sources of new demand. It’s now common knowledge that training and running AI models requires an enormous physical footprint: data centers, the land they sit on, the power that feeds them, and the transmission to move that power. The irony is hard to miss: the technology most associated with rendering things obsolete has become one of the most powerful drivers for the hard, physical, slow-to-build assets at the center of the HALO thesis. That demand shows up in how these assets get financed, and data centers are a clear example (Exhibit 2).5
Infrastructure has captured a rising share of data center deal volume over the past decade (Exhibit 2)
That shift—data centers migrating from a real estate story to an infrastructure one—captures the broader point. The buildout is not a discrete trade; it’s a multi-year reconfiguration of how and where capital is deployed.
The third force is the energy transition, which sits at the intersection of the first two. Modernizing generation, expanding transmission, and adding storage represents a long-duration capital commitment that is, in direction if not pace, largely settled. AI-driven power demand has only sharpened the urgency, ending a long stretch of flat electricity growth and sending utility capital expenditure projections sharply higher throughout the end of the decade.6
Infrastructure, real estate, and energy investment are all rising, three structural forces pulling in the same direction (Exhibit 3)
None of these forces depends on a particular interest rate environment or market mood. They are tied to physical realities like aging systems that must be rebuilt, compute that must be powered, energy that must be reconfigured, and they are not resolved in a single cycle.
Accessing Hard Assets Through Private Markets
For advisors, the structural case may raise a practical question: how can I gain exposure to this rotation? Hard assets do not lend themselves to the daily liquidity of public markets, and the vehicles built to hold them reflect that. In considering HALO strategies and their liquidity characteristics, three structures have been capturing momentum, each with a different liquidity and access profile.
Tender offer funds drew the largest share of monthly alternative investment sales in early 2026.7 They are closed-end vehicles with no exchange listing, offering periodic repurchase windows, typically quarterly, at the fund’s board of trustees’ discretion. That discretion allows the fund to better manage liquidity and invest in less-liquid assets, like infrastructure and real estate, without facing the same redemption pressures and daily redeemable funds. A trade-off is that liquidity may be available but never guaranteed.
Interval funds offer a more rules-based version of the same idea. As registered closed-end funds, they are required to offer periodic repurchases at defined intervals, giving advisors a more predictable liquidity conversation with their clients newer to the space. Lower minimums and a familiar regulatory structure have made them one of the more accessible entry points into real asset strategies.
Private placements are securities offered privately to a limited group of investors rather than registered for sale to the public. They sit at the institutional end of the spectrum and now account for just over half of all alternative investment fundraising, up sharply from a year earlier.8 These structures, including private REITs, infrastructure funds, and DSTs, often carry higher eligibility requirements. Their illiquidity is designed—but not guaranteed—to allow managers to hold the long-duration positions that hard asset value generally requires. Building a power grid or a logistics network isn’t a six-month project.
Across all three, there are several questions an advisor may ask. What is the underlying asset exposure, and does it align with the HALO thesis? Who is the manager, and what is their track record in this specific asset class? And how do the liquidity terms square with their client’s time horizon?
HALO Strategies: Key Risks To Understand
The structural considerations may be compelling, but the vehicles and the asset class carry real risks that warrant a clear-eyed view.
Liquidity and Redemption Risk: Hard asset strategies are inherently illiquid. Tender offer and interval funds provide periodic liquidity windows that may be limited or suspended, and private placements typically have no secondary market at all. Advisors should review offering documents carefully before committing capital.
Valuation and Market Risk: Valuations are generally based on fundamentals rather than daily market prices and can be affected by interest rates, commodity prices, and broader economic conditions.
Manager Risk: Manager selection can be an important determinant of outcomes, which makes diligence on track record, strategy, and fees paramount.
Regulatory and Policy Risk: Because many of these strategies are supported by government policy frameworks, changes in regulation, tax treatment, or public spending priorities could affect the economics of specific investments.