Individual investors' unprecedented degree of access to private stock has created a $120 billion market, igniting yet another land grab by Wall Street firms and other big institutions. An increasing number of players, including Morgan Stanley and Charles Schwab, in the past year have either acquired pre-IPO-focused trading platforms or struck fintech partnerships aimed at boosting private market alternatives to clients in the wealth channel. While Wall Street's new partnerships with private stock marketplaces are still in their early days, they are designed to bring a much larger scale to retail investors' ability to participate in deals once reserved for venture capitalists and big institutional investors.
"The established firms are realizing this is a market that's here to stay and not just a five-year fad," said Ben Haber, founder and CEO of Monark Markets, a fintech startup that specializes in private market trading infrastructure. Taken together, recent high-profile moves to leverage retail-oriented secondhand stock signal the financial industry's deepening conviction about the strategic opportunity posed by a historic convergence of public and private markets. An estimated $150 trillion in private wealth is up for grabs as high-net-worth individuals increasingly look to invest in alternatives to the public market.
Secondary trading has surged in importance and size as a liquidity play over the past decade, creating a sub-industry segment that PitchBook estimates to be worth more than $120 billion in its own right. Related read: US VC Secondary Market Watch With venture-backed companies staying private longer, startups' management teams have worked closely with specialty secondary firms on tender offers and other structured arrangements to help founders, employees and early investors find counterparties to buy out their shares. So far, the most common way that wealth advisers allocate to alternatives has been through the $600 billion market for semi-liquid evergreen funds, which offer retail investors indirect ownership of private credit, private equity and private real estate assets.
Related PitchBook research: The Evergreen Fund Landscape But the rise of popular private-company platforms like EquityZen and Forge Global has opened a path for eligible individuals to directly own hard-to-get stock in companies before they go public. Both firms also sell indirect stakes through SPVs and thematic funds. Forge said in a regulatory filing it had 721,000 users at the end of 2024, and Morgan Stanley in February said EquityZen had over 800,000.
Intense interest in names like SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI has driven a boom in publicly traded mutual funds, ETFs and special purpose vehicles promising early, pre-IPO exposure for almost anyone with a brokerage account. But trading volume has been heavily concentrated in those top three stocks, setting the stage for a reset as investors turn to the next tier of prized names, such as Stripe, Databricks and Anduril Industries. "There is inevitably going to be a temporary crater with these top names coming public since they are so big," said PitchBook senior analyst Emily Zheng.
The new era of integrating the platforms into the Wall Street giants kicked into high gear in January, when Morgan Stanley, one of the world's biggest private banks, completed its acquisition of EquityZen, a platform specializing in secondary market shares of private companies. In March, Charles Schwab closed on its purchase of Forge Global, one of EquityZen's rivals. And last month Goldman Sachs embarked a new initiative to build out its own platform to get clients greater access to pre-IPO shares.
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