Kids love art, and we’re not talking about finger paintings.

It’s no secret that younger investors have an appetite for alternative investments like cryptocurrency, private equity and commodities. But some are also developing a taste for fine art. Gen Z collectors spent twice as much on art as any older generation in 2025 and the first half of 2026, according to the latest Art Basel and UBS survey. And while just 1% of collectors bought artworks priced above $1 million, Gen Z accounted for nearly half of those buyers.

“They were the highest spenders in every segment of collectibles, not just fine art and antiques,” Clare McAndrew, founder of Arts Economics and author of the report, said at a recent press conference in New York City. “They’re really spending at a much higher level.”

Priceless Pieces

Gen Z collectors are spending across the art and collectibles landscape, from paintings and sculptures to antiques, decorative art and luxury items. The survey’s findings underscore just how much younger buyers are willing to spend:

• Average spending on fine art topped $124,000 in 2025, up 13% from the previous year. Among Gen Z collectors, average spending exceeded $347,000.
• Gen Z spent an average of $151,300 on jewelry and gems, more than five times the $29,500 spent by Gen X, the next-highest-spending generation.
• Younger collectors also expressed strong buying intentions across several categories, with 64% of Gen Z collectors planning to buy a painting in the next 12 months.

Art School. Retirement and brokerage accounts remain the bedrock of financial planning. But for some high- and ultrahigh-net-worth clients, art can represent a significant share of their wealth. That makes it important for financial advisors to understand the market and how to help clients navigate it.

“Making yourself at least acquainted with the outlines of the art market is very helpful for any financial advisor,” Matthew Newton, head of Art Advisory Americas at UBS, said at the same press event. Even clients who aren’t collectors may be curious about the art world at a certain wealth level, he added. “They visit friends’ homes to see their collections and read headlines about record-breaking auction prices.”

As the Rolling Stones sang back in the 60s, you can’t always get what you want. But when it comes to private markets, that’s becoming less true.

For years, private markets were reserved for wealthy and institutional investors. Now, everyday folks saving for their retirement, down payments and more are being offered increasing opportunities to engage with private equity, private credit and other alternative investments. But while the public markets have prices that are continuously updated, valuations for private assets are typically reported quarterly, and the data often lags. Factors also vary across private market funds that make apples-to-apples comparisons difficult.

The ability to assess whether a private asset fits into a portfolio, however, is what investors want: 78% of affluent investors say benchmarks boost their confidence in private markets, and 92% say benchmark comparison is important when evaluating returns, according to a survey earlier this year from FTSE Russell.

“A benchmark turns a private-market pitch into a measurable trade-off,” said financial advisor Mitchell Dyer of Dyer Private Wealth Management. “Without transparent comparisons that account for fees, risk and illiquidity, investors may be unable to tell whether they are being adequately compensated.”

(I Can’t Get No) Comparison

A lot of advisors use public-market benchmarks as a “good enough” equivalent, said Courtney Scharff, MSCI’s head of private-asset indexes and taxonomies. But benchmarking a private portfolio to a public benchmark is creating a “really big mismatch,” since the public benchmark doesn’t account for things like cash flow or the specific structure of a fund.

“That public benchmark is actually more like an opportunity-cost benchmark,” Scharff said. “It’s showing what you could have gotten if you had just gone into the public market. … It doesn’t actually tell you your performance relative to the market you’re in.”

But that’s changing:

• MSCI is creating benchmarks by collecting, anonymizing and aggregating data from limited partners (private fund investors) and general partners (fund managers).
• Last year, FTSE Russell and StepStone Group teamed up to launch private market indexes that reflect daily fund-level activity.
• S&P Global collaborated with investment firms Cambridge Associates and Mercer last year to offer comprehensive private market performance analytics. The first datasets, released in March, introduce standardized data across thousands of funds and their underlying assets.

Can’t You Hear Investors Knocking. As more individual investors participate, benchmarks will be built more around how they actually invest, said Brad Walker, co-president at CAIS, an alternative investment platform. He said he expects more rules-based, independently calculated benchmarks that sit alongside the traditional institutional data, benchmarks organized by strategy and by structure, and technology that puts benchmark context next to the investment itself, so advisors are not assembling it from separate sources.

Maybe private-markets investors, if they try sometime, will find they get what they need.

Those looking for bitcoin without the bust may soon have a new option.

BlackRock on Monday filed for a buffered bitcoin fund, the firm’s foray into the world of structured protection for crypto and its third bitcoin fund — the other two being the iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT) and iShares Bitcoin Premium Income ETF (BITA). The iShares Bitcoin Managed Protection ETF (PBIT) will give investors 10% downside protection in the form of three overlapping options tranches. The move signals the fund manager’s willingness to use options to mitigate risk even for cryptocurrencies, especially given the digital asset’s volatility: Bitcoin is down over 35% from the record price of $126,080 last October.

“This is a notable step for a manager like BlackRock,” said Bilal Little, global ETF strategist at Direxion and a former BlackRock employee. “A firm like BlackRock thinks very hard about portfolio construction, so they think about how these asset classes fit together.”

Buffer Buffet

Buffered crypto products are the latest innovation in digital assets, which have been dominated by BlackRock’s IBIT — a fund that recently had its largest single-day inflow in a year. Using options to mitigate risk is one part of BlackRock’s strategy, but using volatility for income premium is the other half of the equation, Little said. “Investors today want income, stability or growth — one of those three,” he said. “They’ll give up some upside within the option to get a guaranteed rate of return. … That’s why you see issuers launch [volatility managed bitcoin funds] today.” A buffered crypto product might also serve as a counter to offerings like leveraged bitcoin funds, which have also been launching left and right.

Other firms have their own volatility-managed bitcoin ETFs:

• Calamos offers a series of laddered structured protection bitcoin ETFs. These include the Calamos Laddered Bitcoin Structured Alt Protection ETF (CBOL), Laddered Bitcoin 90 Series Structured Alt Protection ETF (CBXL) and Laddered Bitcoin 80 Series Structured Alt Protection ETF (CBTL).
• Innovator has its Uncapped Bitcoin 20 Floor ETF (QBF), which provides exposure to bitcoin with a 20% downside floor.
• FT Vest’s line of Bitcoin Strategy Floor15 ETFs use a similar strategy, albeit with a current cap of nearly 27% and floor of 15%.

Room to Grow. There’s no dominant player yet in buffered crypto ETFs, said Grant Ogard, a portfolio manager at BufferLabs. Investors who haven’t gotten into crypto before are more likely to get into these types of funds, he added.

“There’s a lot of potential there because the audience for bitcoin is a little narrower than the audience for buffered bitcoin,” Ogard said. “People get afraid when they hear crypto … so there’s a lot of appetite for a differentiated asset but with a more pleasing risk level.”