The wealthy don't simply own more assets — they own different ones. Family offices managing generational capital routinely allocate 30–40% of portfolios to alternatives: infrastructure, private credit, managed futures, reinsurance, and real assets. They're not chasing higher returns. They're engineering portfolios where not everything falls simultaneously.
Australian retail investors, by contrast, are overwhelmingly concentrated. The average self-managed super fund holds the ASX 200 through direct equities and property — two asset classes with a correlation that tightened dramatically during the 2020 and 2022 drawdowns. When sentiment breaks, both tend to move in the same direction at the worst possible time.