Hi {{first_name}},

It kicked off in 2013. Regulators started to allow fund managers to advertise private deals directly to accredited investors. That initial move was the first among many changes to the regulations around private markets. The accessibility of private markets could get even more simple if the latest proposal from the DOL goes through. A new rule that could send 401(k) dollars into private markets. 

Trillions of dollars, capital that's never had legal access, could become eligible practically overnight. 

Investing is about to change significantly. But before you race in with the masses, the right education is still a priority.

And it's all about to accelerate. Over the next five years, millions of new retail investors will make their first private market investment. Yes. I’m not saying thousands, I’m saying millions. 

That capital is now set to move from public markets into private ones. A shift none of us have seen before.

It's bound to be a mega-trend with the ability to reshape the industry. I’m sharing this in the very first innings. For 50 years, a $20 million fortune came from one of a few places. You built a company. You sold it. Or you inherited it.

That's no longer the only option. In fact, the pathways just to enter the private markets are expanding. So, this week I’m showing you:

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

P.S. I have a new PE offering coming together and launching in the next few weeks. A company I’ve been invested in for 11 years was just awarded a $100 million order and they need growth capital to execute. 

Make sure you’re registered at Build Wealth to get notified first.

Three shifts are landing at once. Regulatory, technological, and behavioral. Together they hand individual investors a return profile they've never had steady access to. For the first time, you can aim past what public markets pay out and build real wealth through allocation alone. So forget the 7.5% you've been trained to expect from stocks. There’s a way to aim higher and you have the tools to get there. 

If you were invested in the public markets in 2000, you know what a lost decade feels like. A dollar in the S&P 500 that January was worth about the same ten years later. The market took a decade of your life and handed back nothing. Throw in double digit crashes sprinkled in for good, emotional measure.

That's the risk of owning one market priced by mood every second. Public markets re-trade on sentiment all day long. A company with no earnings can trade at 100 times revenue because enough people believe it should. You can hold a genuinely great business straight through a bad decade and still walk away empty, because the crowd was looking somewhere else.

Private markets price on different inputs. Valuations move on cash flow, growth, and the terms of the deal. There is a different promise and payoff. 

The evidence, across decades and asset classes

Private equity has cooled lately, up against a stock market supercharged by AI enthusiasm. Zoom out, and the longer record holds. By Hamilton Lane's 2026 accounting, private credit has beaten its public benchmark every year for 24 years running. Private real estate has outperformed for 15 years straight. And private equity is still building a positive return story. A dollar invested in PE in 2015 grew to $3.96 by 2024, versus $3.51 in the S&P 500 and $2.61 in the MSCI World (the international view).

Although, one category cooling while several others keep compounding is what broad exposure across private markets is built to capture.

The doors that used to be locked

For most of the last century, none of this detail reached you unless you were an institution or already rich. Then the doors began to open. In 2013, regulators let fund managers advertise private deals to accredited investors for the first time. Reg A+ opened a mini-IPO path for smaller companies in 2015. In 2020, the SEC added professional credentials — the Series 7, 65, and 82 — as a path to accredited status, sitting alongside the older net-worth and income tests. And in March 2026, the Department of Labor proposed a rule to make it easier for 401(k) plans to offer private assets, a change that could eventually route trillions in retirement dollars toward private markets.

Thirteen years of slowly bringing that barrier to entry down and the largest one is still in motion.

What aiming higher looks like

Take a $350,000 earner who invests 20% of income every year for a decade. In public markets at 7.5%, they finish with about $1.06 million. The same person, same savings rate, in private alternatives at 18% finishes with about $1.94 million.

That's an $878,000 gap. Same discipline, different allocation.

Now that you are qualified, why are you standing still?

Roughly 22 million American households qualify as accredited investors today, and only a sliver have put money into private markets so far. 

However, there is still an influx of new investors in private markets. They are younger wealthy investors, often Gen Z and Millennials, who are choosing to hold about 15–17% of their portfolios in alternatives. To compare, that's ~3x times the roughly 5% older generations allocate. The generation with the least capital is moving in fast.

Why the deals today won't be the deals tomorrow

The best returns in a new market show up while it’s still learning its efficiency. Before enough capital arrives. Private markets paid out for decades partly because access was scarce. Now more are entering the space. 

Retail money in private-market strategies is projected to nearly double, from about $1.9 trillion to $3.7 trillion by 2029. The people building these products see the wave getting closer. 

The deals available when 5% of qualified investors have shown up will not be the deals available at 20% or 40%. Pricing tightens as capital chases it.

Is it time to get ahead of the masses? 

Regulation opened the door. Decades of returns across credit, real estate, and equity show what's on the other side. 

This week the team dug into the flow of new investors and where they are coming from. And how retail capital is flowing into private markets, by generation, and by asset class. Check it out in the full report, Retail Investors Moving to Private Markets.

Image: Mark Walstead is a seasoned trader who made the leap into private alts last week as a sophisticated investor. Prior to 2020 his investment would have been illegal.

The trader who bought something he can't sell

Mark Walstead makes his living on liquidity. He's a stock trader. He’s 28, based in Miami and self-taught. His entire edge is the ability to move quickly. Read a volatile stock name, take the position, and be out again just as fast. So it says something that his newest investment is one he can't sell for three years. 

He bought the lockup on purpose.

Mark went full-time in 2021 as a trader. He was working as a bank teller prior to that. But after a short time trading on the side, he strung together three straight green months and decided he wanted to go for it.  By January of 2021 the market handed him a run big enough to quit on. He's traded professionally ever since. Fundamentals first (he reads balance sheets for how much cash a company really has), then sentiment, then the chart. 

Five years in, he's good at it, and he knows he's good at it.

Though he also hit on the problem a lot of successful traders eventually find. Everything he owned lived inside one market. No employer, no 401(k), or IRA. A brokerage account and a lot of conviction. He got curious. 

As someone always in search of more education, he came across the business of buying businesses. That’s when he stumbled on Build Wealth back in February of this year.  Business acquisition is a classic route to owning something that compounds. He ran the numbers on what it demands: i.e., one to three years of full-time work before it resembles anything passive. He liked trading and wanted to keep doing it. He just wanted to add something passive to work alongside it.

Around the same time, he started tearing through this very newsletter, taking notes, running the math himself. He read several books and dug into videos from plenty of smart investors. The more he consumed and learned, the more he was convinced this may be the right path. Trading had built his cash flow. Private markets, he started to think, could build the long-term wealth underneath it.

One hurdle stood in the way. Mark had never heard the term accredited investor, let alone know if he qualified or not. But income and net worth aren't the only way in. For a private offering that isn't publicly advertised, an investor can also qualify on the strength of their knowledge and experience, a sophisticated investor. That's the path Mark chose to walk.

His first deal is a ground-up construction project on track to double his capital in 36 months.

Diving into private markets from public means getting your head around the illiquidity. A day trader's instinct is to react.

"You see a headline. You see a lot of red. We're all human at the end of the day,” he says.

Mark knows that instinct well, which is why he likes that this money will sit somewhere he can't reach it. He treats the three-year hold as a guardrail he chose, sizing the allocation to what he can afford to leave alone, filing it away mentally like a retirement account, and budgeting his life around never watching it move. "Don't put money in that you don't want to lose access to."

He's honest that it feels strange at first. Watching a position he can't check every four hours is a different muscle than the one he's built trading. "You're never prepared until you actually do something," he says. "It's a hit on the liquid net worth number. But it's a necessary hit." He'd rather build that muscle now with time on his side.

What he's describing is a shift in identity. To stop only trading and start allocating. He mastered the short game. Now he's about to learn the long one.

You met the $350,000 earner earlier in this issue. Here's what that same decade looks like at every income level. 

The $350,000 earner is ideal, but it’s just an example. You will have your own number to identify. Here's how to build your own version of that gap in a few short steps. 

Retirement contributions, brokerage deposits, anything past your emergency fund and fixed costs. Count only what you can genuinely redirect. That's your number.

Use the table with annual amounts invested and the returns. It runs from $50,000 to $250,000 over ten years, at 7.5% (public markets), 9% (a passive private-markets blend), and 18% (this issue's illustrative anchor). 

Land on the row closest to your number; fall between two and your answer falls between them.

The gap between the public and private columns from above is what staying in one lane costs you, over the exact timeline you'll actually invest.

For some, that's tens of thousands. For others with a longer runway, it approaches $878,000 earlier. Either way, it's your number now.

One caveat before you act on this playbook. 

Private markets won't hand you a price every day the way a brokerage app does. You're trading daily visibility for a return profile that has historically compounded higher — a trade that only makes sense once you understand it going in.

And about that 18%? The percentage comes from blending private equity, private credit, and real estate using long-run benchmarks and you land closer to 9% — the passive, buy-everything version. The 18% sits above that, in the range smaller, focused funds and direct sponsor deals have shown. You treat it as an illustrative anchor to reason with that is grounded in real data, and remember it’s never a guarantee of what you'll earn.

So run your number, then decide. If you're not yet accredited, the quickest legal route is often a professional exam like the Series 65. Maybe worth looking into sooner rather than later. And if you already qualify as accredited, the only question left is how much of that gap you're willing to act on.

Once you've run your number, our current offering gives you a live one to weigh it against. The BuildRise III: Rollick is open now and is projecting a 26.5% IRR to investors. It's filling up fast, so take a look now with full investor details.

"No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come."

— Victor Hugo 

Progress is inevitable. Twenty-two million households haven't gotten up yet, and 95% haven't shown up to the site yet. Wait and see what happens once they learn what you already know.

Did this land in your inbox via a friend or colleague? Subscribe to get your own weekly insight into private markets.

Already a reader? Help other investors open their eyes to the private markets and forward this to someone who would value the insight. Or hit reply to tell us what you think.

By continuing to receive the Wealth Stack newsletter, you acknowledge and accept our Privacy Policy, which includes the sharing of subscriber engagement data with select advertising partners.  

To unsubscribe, click here.

This is not financial advice. Illustrative output of a reasoned thought experiment. Not a backtest, guarantee, or prospectus. Actual results vary based on market conditions, fund selection, timing, fees, taxes, and factors not modeled. Private credit, CRE, and leveraged strategies involve significant risk including loss of principal. Consult a qualified financial advisor.