Jason M. Lemkin worries that letting 401(k) investors buy private equity and venture capital turns retirement into a casino. The counterargument: PE and venture have historically delivered strong returns, but retail investors get the worst deals, highest markups, and least transparency. Complexity favors the banker, not you.
Chapters
Is stuffing retail investors' 401(k)s with PE a casino issue? With PE investments they don't even understand, they have no financials for, don't know what the markups are? Is that at the edge of a casino, crying in a casino?
I understand what you're saying, which is that the more unsophisticated the investor and the more complex the instrument, the more likely it is that the investor will lose and the promoter will win. It's one of those life rules. It's why even IPOs, there's complex things and you kind of go, whenever it's complex, Your rule of thumb should be whenever a banker is explaining something complex, you're losing money. So, I don't think it's as bad as quote the casino because I think on aggregate, I mean, because stepping back, the casino comment is this, in the casino, the median expected return is negative because the house takes a take and the median is a loss. Even PE, look, the long-term returns in PE aren't are good. The long-term returns in venture are good. So in theory, allowing individual investors to access those returns might have meant some individual investors would've got the Databricks exposure that Andreessen got. So it's not a bad idea. But to your point, Jason, the problem is often the more complex the instruments are, the more likely it is to go wrong, the more likely it is to be adverse selection, the more likely it is that The good parts of the PE and venture value chain don't get allocated to the retail investors.