It's why as a retail investor, never buy things that would otherwise have not been available to you (but was to those "elite"/institutional investors previously).
replyThink pre-IPO buy-in. Investors in the know and other well connected institutional investors get first dibs on all of the good ones. The bad ones are pawned off to retail investors. It's no different with private credit and private equity. These sorts of deals have good ones and bad ones - the good ones will have been taken by the time it flows down to retail.
This can't be a to-die-on rule though. Retail would've never bought GOOG, or TSLA, or AAPL if that were the case. Maybe I'm just being pedantic.
replyEven for good assets there's a price you shouldn't pay. People are joking(?) about triple-layer SPVs where you can get pre-IPO exposure but at higher-than-IPO price.
replyGoogle and Apple didn't go through ten funding rounds like today's startups do. Apple had one angel and three rounds, Google had one angel and literally just an A round after that; then retail investors could capture all the upside. Now there's way more time for private investors to pick the bones clean before it gets dumped on the public.
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