They have similar goals, capital preservation, consistent cash-flow so they don&#x27;t deplete the principal. I&#x27;m in Canada so examples we often cite are the Canadian Pension Plan (CPP), Ontario Teacher Pension Plan (OTPP) and the Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS). All of these do a lot of private equity investing and OMERS in particular has invested in a number of Canadian tech companies and IPOs, incuding recently Shopify and Hootsuite. All of them have had quite impressive and consistent results as well.<p>The problem with using public index funds to mimic these managers asset allocations is the higher volatility of publicly traded assets. For example in 2008 widespread panic caused people to sell their mutual funds and flee to cash which widely hold a variety of assets, so all of them suffered. This included publicly traded Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs). At one point they were selling for 80% of their on paper asset value, which was entirely irrational. Many money managers that typically invested privately in commercial real estate because of that volatility took that opportunity to buy public REITs at a discount.<p>That being said, you can definitely do a decent job of adding asset class diversification with modern ETFs (and the market for these keeps growing). There are now infrastructure ETFs, REITs (Vanguard&#x27;s REIT is really well priced), covered call ETFs, etc. Just don&#x27;t expect to get exactly the same results of these managers and expect to have to handle larger volatility.<p>That being said, if you can weather these market movements, and you are saving regularly, volatility can be a good thing, if you can take advantage of lower asset prices with ongoing contribution then that is great.