Wild market swings and billionaire prophecies.

Inside: a phased plan for high earners to move wealth out of public markets.

November 25, 2025

Hi ,

First, Peter Thiel shorts Nvidia. Then Michael Burry quits his hedge fund and proclaims a bubble. Nvidia beats expectations but the delayed September Jobs Report is doom and gloom. 

The markets swing. 

Right now, a portfolio built inside public markets feels more fragile than ever. Prices are moving on forces that don’t resemble the economic reality most people live in. Narratives accelerate. Volatility expands. Long-standing correlations weaken. The market keeps rising, yet investor confidence barely budges. There’s a high-stakes drama unfolding and your net worth is caught in the middle.

You can feel it even if you can’t name it.

If most of your wealth lives inside that system, you feel the tension every time you refresh your portfolio. Wealth grows on paper while stability slips in practice. You hit the milestones you once hoped for, but your sense of control doesn’t scale with the numbers.

This isn’t about fear. The structure is the issue.

And that’s exactly why more sophisticated investors are quietly shifting part of their portfolio away from the constant repricing of  public markets and into the production engine of private markets.

Public markets react instantly to liquidity, flows, narratives, expectations, and sentiment. Private markets behave differently. They compound through cash flow, contracts, operations, and time. When perception and performance drift apart — the way they have recently — portfolios concentrated in public pricing begin to feel emotionally and structurally misaligned.

This issue is about fixing that misalignment.

We’re looking at how to right-size your public exposure, introduce private engines that stabilize your wealth, and design a stack that behaves the way you want your life to feel — calm, durable, and in control.

Here’s what you’ll find inside:

  • Shift Your Stack: How today’s market behavior affects concentrated public portfolios.

  • Case Study: How one high earner reduced fragility without blowing up her existing holdings.

  • Playbook: A simple step-by-step blueprint for shifting from public dependence to private stability.

— Walker Deibel
WSJ & USA Today Bestselling Author of Buy Then Build
Founder, Build Wealth

SHIFT YOUR STACK

When Markets Break From Reality, Stability Needs a New Strategy

A pattern is emerging  among high earners: their portfolios have never been larger, yet their confidence has never felt thinner. They can show seven-figure or even eight-figure balances, but still feel like a single market mood swing can erase months of progress. The contradiction is obvious once you spell it out. Wealth increases. Volatility increases,. The experience of stability doesn’t follow.

This tension is strongest for investors who hold most of their net worth in public markets. Public markets create wealth that is reported instantly and repriced constantly. That structure is efficient, but it also means your personal sense of security is tied to a mechanism that moves for reasons unrelated to fundamentals.

Lately, that mechanism has been behaving in unusual ways. Several signals imply that public markets are running on different forces than the economic reality most investors live in.

Before making big portfolio moves, it’s worth understanding the environment you’re currently exposed to.

1. Public Markets Are Pushing Story Over Substance

The NASDAQ’s volatility has been running roughly four times higher than during the dot-com era. Higher volatility allows asset prices to swing well beyond actual performance. 

Index concentration has also increased, with the top ten companies in the NASDAQ Composite now making up more than half the index. This is  up from about one-third in 1999.

Another signal is the decoupling between job creation and market valuation. For two decades, the S&P 500 and private job growth moved together with extremely high correlation. In late 2022 that relationship flipped. Valuations continued to rise while new job openings fell. It’s not evidence of an imminent collapse, but it shows the pricing engine is operating on assumptions beyond current economic output.

There’s also unusual investor behavior among the billionaires at the top of the market. Look at Buffett accumulating cash and Thiel reducing major stock positions. It doesn’t guarantee anything. It simply reflects a preference for liquidity in an environment where valuations and volatility have drifted away from their historical relationship.

2. AI Has Widened the Gap Between the Story and the Real Economy

The AI boom has produced a growing gap between market value and economic contribution. AI is transformative, but its benefits are still largely theoretical, while its effects on GDP and jobs remain limited. AI infrastructure is creating a circular economy where companies like OpenAI, Nvidia, Broadcom, etc are all interconnected - investing in each other, supplying each other, building demand together. Many of these companies make up that top ten list in the composite. So now markets are capitalizing potential productivity gains that have not appeared in the real economy. 

This creates a situation where prices rise faster than the performance metrics most investors follow. You see it clearly in the correlation inversion between valuations and employment. 

So is AI a bubble? Maybe. 

You don’t have to guess whether AI is a bubble.

You position your wealth so you win in either world:

  • If AI is a bubble → private markets win.

  • If AI isn’t a bubble → private markets still win.

3. Public Markets and Private Markets Operate on Different Principles

Public markets price assets continuously, responding to liquidity, expectations, macro signals, and flows. It offers transparency and liquidity, but ties your personal sense of wealth to short-term inputs that are often unrelated to long-term performance.

Private markets rely on a different input. They value production, cash flow, contracts, operations, and execution. Private assets do not reprice minute by minute, and their behavior is shaped by what a business produces, not how investors feel that day.

When the public markets behave normally, these two systems can complement each other well. When the pricing mechanism shifts toward narrative or expected productivity, the emotional volatility of a public-heavy portfolio starts to feel fragile even when long-term fundamentals are sound.

This is why many high earners feel wealthy but not secure.

4. The Quiet Exit Is a Structural Shift, Not a Market Call

This shift does not require a bubble thesis. It does not predict anything. It simply acknowledges that the public-market environment has entered a period where prices respond more heavily to narrative, concentration, and volatility than to production and output.

A portfolio designed for stability in this environment needs more than one engine. Public equities remain important for liquidity and participation. Private income and private growth positions provide ballast and a more predictable compounding path. Optionality positions offer targeted upside without exposing your core net worth to daily repricing.

The result is not a bet against public markets. It is a decision to reduce dependence on a pricing system that has been behaving unpredictably.

5. Multi-Engine Portfolios Change the Experience of Wealth

Introducing income-producing private assets creates a smoother cash flow profile. Adding private growth assets reduces reliance on daily market sentiment. Introducing a small optionality bucket gives you access to asymmetric upside without exposing your entire balance sheet to narrative-driven cycles.

You continue to participate in public markets, but your confidence no longer rises and falls with each news cycle. Your portfolio begins to feel owned rather than observed.

This is the shift sophisticated investors make when markets behave strangely enough that relying on a single engine stops feeling aligned with their long-term goals. 

Plus, Sharpe ratio comparisons published by Hamilton Lane and Preqin show that private allocations have delivered higher risk-adjusted returns across long periods.

The 10 Structural Shifts

For the full breakdown of all 10 structural shifts shaping today’s market — including charts, data, and cycle analysis — read the full report.

CASE STUDY

Investor Profile: The Corporate Diversifier

How One Tech Executive Uses Her Paycheck to Exit Concentration Risk

Katie Haw knew every deal she closed strengthened her financial future, but she still felt uneasy. Her career and net worth were accelerating fast, and with it, her risk.

“A very large portion of my net worth sat in a single tech stock,” she says. “I’m investing in the company with my job and in the stock itself. I realized it had quickly become a very risky proposition.”

Katie has spent her career in enterprise tech sales, closing large, complex software deals. Like many top performers in the sector, her compensation blends W-2 income, large-variable commissions, and ongoing restricted stock units (RSUs). It’s a powerful combination — but one with structural weaknesses.

During a market downturn, Katie watched her net worth drop over 14% on paper.  At that moment, she realized her portfolio’s achilles heel: high concentration with her employer and correlation with the fluctuations of the S&P. So she decided to change the trajectory of her wealth. Instead of continuing to pour new money into the public markets, she redirected “fresh” liquidity (commissions, bonus-driven cash, and strategically unlocked RSUs) into private market opportunities.

Building a Portfolio Beyond the Ticker Symbol

Katie didn’t unwind her legacy stock holdings or try to time the market. She simply rerouted the flow of new capital.

“I still get RSUs as part of my compensation. I’m choosing at the moment not to sell those. I’m using W-2 income to pay the tax, and any additional cash I invest in private placements.”

One of Katie's first entries into private investing came through a land development deal in North Carolina. Watching the project come full cycle opened her eyes to the power of value creation in action: from raw land through entitlements, infrastructure, and then exit to a residential developer. And it solidified her conviction.

“That experience reinforced the value of being in the right operator’s hands,” she says. “Understanding the mechanics of value creation is important to me.”

Today, roughly 20–25% of her net worth is in private investments, including real estate, operating companies, and tech-adjacent opportunities where she understands the drivers of value.

She takes the same intentional approach with retirement accounts. Every time she changed employers, she rolled over old 401(k)s into a consolidated portfolio, “not leaving a soldier behind.” Part of that now sits in a self-directed Roth invested in private real estate, giving her flexibility and tax-advantaged exposure to alternative assets.

How To Copy Her Moves

Katie doesn’t use a financial advisor. With an MBA in finance, she accepts the tradeoff: she may leave some tax optimization on the table, but she gains full control of her deceptively simple strategy.

Katie’s 4-Step Migration Strategy: 

  • Let legacy public holdings compound.

  • Use new savings + RSU-driven liquidity to fund private deals.

  • Reinvest private returns back into new private opportunities.

  • Gradually expand private exposure, without forcing big moves or triggering unnecessary taxes.

“I’m not trying to time anything,” she says. “I’m trying to rebalance away from concentration and build income streams that aren’t tied to corporate performance cycles.”

For high-earning professionals sitting on concentrated stock or volatile bonuses, Katie’s story offers an actionable blueprint. Once you know you want to diversify beyond the public markets, her approach shows exactly how to begin — and how to do it without blowing up what you’ve  worked so hard to build.

THE PLAYBOOK

Start Your Own Quiet Exit

1. Choose your public-market floor.

Pick the lowest level of public exposure you can comfortably maintain. Most high-earning professionals land between 50% and 60%. This becomes your anchor for every future decision.

2. Redirect fresh capital, not old positions.

Use new savings — commissions, bonuses, RSU vests, year-end liquidity — to build private exposure. Clean dollars let you expand your private stack without triggering taxes or unwinding legacy positions.

3. Start with private income before private growth.

Income engines steady the system first: private credit, real estate, infrastructure. Once this foundation is functioning, add growth assets like private equity or operating companies.

Sequence matters: stability before scale.

4. Turn distributions into your compounding engine.

Let private cash flow fund your next allocations. This makes the private side self-reinforcing and reduces dependence on new savings.

5. Trim any concentrated public positions gradually.

Sell overweight holdings or vested RSUs over time. Small rotations. No emotional rebalancing. Let pacing, taxes, and convenience guide the trims.

6. Add optionality once the core is stable.

Use small, high-conviction checks for SPVs, secondaries, or special situations. Keep this bucket intentional and proportionate. Optionality adds upside without destabilizing the system.

7. Run a simple annual review.

Once a year, ask yourself three questions:

  • Is public exposure above my target floor?

  • Are income assets performing as expected?

  • Am I reinvesting private distributions?

If the answer is yes, stay the course. If not, adjust slowly and intentionally .

WEALTH STACK REBELLION

“You can’t predict. You can prepare.” -Howard Marks

The loudest markets often signal the quietest exits.
Not because collapse is coming, but because the rules of the game have changed.

Sophisticated investors aren’t trying to call  the top.
They’re stepping off the wheel entirely.

Thiel shorts Nvidia . Burry quits his hedge fund. Buffet piles into cash. 

They’re choosing cash flow over noise.
Structure over sentiment.
Liquidity with purpose.
Assets that compound whether headlines boom or break.

The system says: stay exposed.
Rebel investors say: not on those terms.

The rebellion isn’t giving into fear.
It’s design.
Build your stack so your future depends on production, not perception. Generate value regardless of market mood swings.

WHAT WE ARE READING

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