Private market investment platform Yieldstreet announced a partnership with Wilshire Advisors today, allowing its clients to build diversified model portfolios focused on private investments. Wilshire, a global advisor headquartered in Santa Monica, Calif., has decades of experience in investment research catering to institutional clients and $1.2 trillion in assets under advisement.
The partnership will give Yieldstreet’s 500,000 members access to expanded private market investment strategies developed with the help of Wilshire’s private market and asset allocation experts. Yieldstreet members will also be able to participate in new private market investment opportunities sourced and reviewed by Wilshire’s alternative investment team. Last year, Wilshire’s team deployed more than $1.4 billion across 68 investments.
Private markets currently don’t allow individual investors to access passive investment at scale, noted Michael Weisz, Yieldstreet CEO. “If you want to invest x dollars in a diversified private market portfolio today, I believe that’s nearly impossible,” he said. “With our partnership with Wilshire and their deep expertise helping to advise some of the largest and smartest institutions that had to deploy capital, we were able to leverage state-of-the-art technology and their deep expertise to build a model portfolio that has never been created.”
Yieldstreet announced several partnerships and acquisitions over the past year. Among them was a relationship with self-directed IRA custodian Equity Trust, the acquisition of real estate investment platform Cadre and a broadened cooperation with structured products and annuities platform Luma Financial Technologies.
According to Weisz, these deals help scale up Yieldstreet’s distribution of private market products and reach a bigger audience.
“When we think about each of the partnerships or acquisitions that we are pursuing and have recently announced, they all follow that theme. They are allowing us to grow more quickly and provide private market investments in people’s portfolios,” he said.
Wilshire Advisors has launched several market indexes, among them the Wilshire Liquid Alternative Index and FT Wilshire 5000. The firm’s institutional clients include CalPERS, Nationwide, Allianz, the New York City Police Pension Fund, and the Government of Guam Retirement Fund.