How (and why) we made private market investing more public

We are in the business of helping our clients build wealth. We do this by leveraging our expertise and technology to bring high-quality investment opportunities to everyday Canadians. This started with our managed portfolios, which give anyone access to globally diversified, automatically rebalanced portfolios with fees 75% lower than the average mutual fund.^{^} 

Our alternative investing products are an extension of that idea. Private market investing has been a key part of many institutional investing strategies, including the Maple 8, who are often touted as the “pinnacle of smart money” in Canada. They’ve long been a building block of creating generational wealth, and yet investments like venture capital, private credit, and private equity were traditionally reserved for high net-worth investors through family offices. By using technology, determination, and a highly skilled investment team, we were able to greatly reduce the barriers to entry to these investments.

In 2021, we started with Venture Fund I, providing clients with the ability to invest in venture capital. Since then we have added two more private market products: Wealthsimple Private Credit and Wealthsimple Private Equity. Today thousands of Canadians — people who historically wouldn’t have been able to access these exclusive assets — have invested more than $500M through our funds. 

Private markets don’t come without their risks. Which is why we have been incredibly intentional about not only how we build these alternative investing products, but also how we widen the threshold for who can access them. 

Here’s what that looks like.

We partner with the best of the best fund managers.

The only way to invest in alternatives is through specific managers. Which means finding good managers, maintaining relationships and providing effective oversight. That’s hard for most individual investors to do. That’s where we help our clients.

We work with globally recognized managers to help us build and manage our private investing funds. As fiduciaries, we are legally required to manage our funds in our clients’ interests. We do extensive diligence on managers before investing, and maintain regular oversight including check ins, performance reviews, external auditing and more. 

Our clients are investing alongside institutional investors.

Our private funds are co-investing with leading institutional investors, including Canadian pensions. And the managers we aggressively vetted? They’re significantly invested in the same deals as our clients. That means a high alignment of incentives: our clients’ best interest is in their best interest, and vice versa.

Our funds are built specifically for everyday investors

It’s one thing to make a product available to more investors. It’s another to design it to fit the investing profile of an everyday investor. A few ways we’ve brought this thinking to the design:

Private market investing isn’t for everyone. But it can be an incredibly powerful tool for investors with liquidity, long time horizons, and the ability to take on a little extra risk. Private equity has historically outperformed stocks, and private credit has had similar returns, making both options a great way to build wealth. Plus, private credit can diversify your portfolio. Its floating-rate loans can provide positive returns when interest rates rise sharply and other assets underperform.

For these reasons and more, we are incredibly motivated to keep innovating in this space.

Learn more about our alternative investments here.

^{^2% is the average cost of equity mutual funds in Canada. Actual fees may vary. The Wealthsimple classic portfolio has a management fee of 0.4%-0.5% plus an average MER (management expense ratio) of 0.12% for a total cost of 0.52%–0.62%. For more information, see https://wsim.co/investfees}