Why liquid-alt cost comparison matters
10 June 2026 · 5 min read
In public markets, cost transparency changed everything. Once advisors could line ETFs up side by side and see expense ratios at a glance, capital flowed to the cheaper, better-structured products. Morningstar made that comparison trivial, and the whole industry repriced around it.
Liquid alternatives never had that moment. There are now more than 400 funds across interval, tendered, and tokenised structures, and no neutral place to compare them on cost. Access is defined by which distributor an advisor has a contract with, not by which fund is actually the best value for the client.
Small differences compound into large ones
A fee gap that looks trivial on a fact sheet does not stay trivial. Costs compound against the client every year they hold the position. Over a multi-year horizon, a difference of a few tenths of a percent becomes a meaningful share of the return the client was supposed to keep.
For the advisor, the cost is doubled. Because advisory revenue is a function of assets under management, every basis point that leaks to a distributor is also a basis point of the advisor’s own future revenue. The fee you cannot see is working against both sides of the relationship.
What good looks like
- Every fund in the universe, not just the ones on a distributor’s shelf.
- Cost, liquidity, structure, and terms lined up side by side.
- A neutral source with no fee earned when the client invests.
Cost comparison is not a nice-to-have feature. It is the single change that repriced public markets, and it is the one piece of infrastructure liquid alts are still missing. Build it neutrally, and the advisor finally gets to choose on merit.