An unrelated question: big-tech has been booming lately, and the way that model works, as I understand, is that there are these large venture capital firms in the tech-hubs like Bay Area which finance private startups, 90% of their bets go bust and maybe 1 or 2 unicorns make up for all the losses and more.
So because all of these is private, we retail investors\traders don't have access to it (there maybe some ways but it's not wide spread). So my question is how much are we generally missing out by not having access to this market of initial-stage private companies? I mean in general it's all equity - same asset class as we can all trade on public exchanges, just sort of a different flavor of it "initial-stage private tech equity".
It's just the majority of people only hear the success stories, how someone who invested in twitter on initial stage made 10,000x of his money or something, but of course he also lost 95% of his other bets, so how really lucrative this business is if researched objectively and systematically (were there attempts to research it?), is there anything fundamentally different between tech VCs and regular hedge-funds?
For me it's just curiosity, there's really nothing I can actually do about it either way, except maybe being able to better filter the overhyped news about awesome startup investment successes..
I know for example that investing in the recent IPOs is generally a bad idea, there was research that recent IPOs combined trail the market for the first several years..
There was also some research which concluded that historically every "great new thing" always lags behind the old established industries in terms of actual profits for shareholders (I think they looked at railroads which were very hyped as well at the time)..