Michael Gold on the 2026 Trends Reshaping Wealth Planning
Wealth management is entering 2026 with steady markets but a business model under real pressure, as digital tools reshape how advice reaches everyday investors. Michael Gold, founder and chief executive of Gold Family Wealth in Westport, Connecticut, believes the ultra high net worth segment he serves still runs by different rules, even as automation spreads through the rest of the industry.
One trend Gold points to is the growing role of private markets in wealthy family portfolios. About 83 percent of advisors now say a solid lineup of private asset offerings has become essential, a marked change from a few years ago when such holdings sat on the margins of most portfolios. For families with tens of millions in assets, private markets have shifted from a niche allocation into a core building block of how wealth gets structured.
Private Markets Move to the Core
At the same time, artificial intelligence and digital platforms are making basic wealth planning tools accessible to far more people than before, handling routine analysis and portfolio modeling that once required a dedicated advisor. Michael Gold Westport doesn’t dismiss this shift, but he argues it widens rather than closes the gap for ultra wealthy families, since their needs extend well past the kind of standardized advice software can provide.
Gold’s Westport based practice has responded by building out a model focused on complexity rather than scale, bringing human first family office services to families with $20 million to $150 million in net worth. His team leans on a network of fractional specialists to cover the ground a single advisor cannot, from enterprise mapping to multigenerational governance. As more firms build dedicated ultra high net worth divisions to compete for this business, Gold believes the advisors who combine deep coordination with genuine judgment, rather than just access to better software, will set themselves apart. Refer to this article for additional information.
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