The Pre-IPO Boom: $120B Secondary Market, SEC Fraud Charges, and Ackman's Retail Access Push

Pre-IPO investing is no longer a niche game for VCs—it's morphing into a $120 billion mass-market asset class, but the infrastructure is still riddled with fraud risk and opaque structures.

Evidence For

• Wall Street is moving in: Morgan Stanley and Charles Schwab have either acquired pre-IPO trading platforms or struck fintech partnerships in the past year, betting that the secondary private-stock market is "here to stay," not a five-year fad.
• **Retail access is the...