The Allocators panel at the 2026 Ben Graham Conference, hosted by CFA Society New York and moderated by Citywire reporter William Johnson, gathered the people who decide where billions of dollars of institutional and private-wealth capital go. Among the panelists who spoke were Thomas Quinn of Xponance, Christopher Haarstick of Bell Wealth and Mervin Burton of Beatrice Advisors. Together they worked through how to allocate when valuations are stretched, what AI means for both markets and the allocation process itself, the private-credit shakeout, gold and crypto, and whether the 60/40 portfolio still makes sense.
Allocating When Everything Looks Expensive
Quinn, a managing director at the roughly $25 billion Xponance who runs a multi-manager division allocating to small and emerging managers for large public plans, framed today’s challenge in terms of the risk budget. He described colleagues cutting their tracking-error budgets to as little as 100 basis points, which leaves little room to chase new opportunities, and invoked Cliff Asness’s point about staying in the game rather than capitulating. His own biggest active bet is non-U.S. developed small-caps, where valuations sit around two-thirds of large-cap counterparts with positive earnings tailwinds.
Burton, who helps run Beatrice Advisors, a two-year-old multifamily office and outsourced CIO that spun out of a single-family office, said his starting point with clients is that equities do not always go up, so the real work is finding diversifiers. He reminded the audience that markets almost always look expensive, that historically the market has traded within 10% of its high about half the time, and that the discipline is to set an asset allocation, revisit liquidity needs when valuations are rich, and stick to the plan.
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