Is Private Equity a Good Investment for Retail Investors?

Amber Kanwar and Dave discuss why more private equity products are being sold to retail investors—and who really benefits.

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 I wanna pick up on your point on private equity, because guess what, that’s coming for retail investors.

All these beautiful products are gonna be coming to retail investors. And I don’t think that a lack of information is kind of the best way to deal with

that because their advisors or whoever, it’s all gonna be coming through the channels, right?

It’s gonna be a new thing to sell. And I think people need to understand it’s linked to what’s going on in the public markets. That’s why all these private investments are rolling into retail hands.

Yeah, I mean, I think they’re rolling into retail hands because they’re money makers for the people selling them. And I think 95% of what I see in the world of product creation is about how do we extract money from retail investors, not how do we add value to their lives? And I mean, that’s one of the sad comments in the industry, but I don’t get much pushback.

And that even industry participants go, yeah, you’re, you’re kind of right. In fact, it’s interesting when you look at ETFs, when the banking industry south of the border and and North too, gets involved in specific ETFs, you know, could be private equity.

It’s almost always the time to get out of that particular space. They tend to come in late when it’s got momentum, it’s getting a lot of attention and it’s an easy sell. Therefore, to these investors who often aren’t particularly well informed, I mean, you do this all day, every day, as do your guests, but again, the average person listening to us and the average Canadian is a teacher.

A nurse, a whatever. They’re not studying this all day, every day. They don’t have any background. They don’t have the Canadian securities course. They don’t have any of that.

And so getting some of this information, harnessing that knowledge productively is exceptionally difficult. That’s my argument for the vast majority of people.