Yieldstreet - Risks of Private Alternatives (Now Willow Wealth)

yogibearbull

Yieldstreet (2015- ) is an online platform that allows retail investors to participate in private market alternative deals (equity, debt) - real estate (26% of AUM), art, legal finance, startups, ship scraping/recycling, etc. The ER may be up to 2%. It promotes these as "Invest like the 1%" or as democratizing private equity/credit. Promised regular income was another lure - some projects haven't paid out a penny. Some private projects have high profile names of celebrities associated with them but that's just PR. Its reports to investors only are often marked confidential and aren't filed or posted anywhere. When these reports were delayed or stopped, or indicated additional risks, or there were notices for additional rescue funding (a clever name for rights-offering in the listed securities world), the concerned investors had to turn to social-media for any related information. All they had in hand were flashy promos/brochures that got them into the projects. In some cases, the indicated collaterals weren't found or were inadequate.

But the convenience of online transactions or App (Apple Store or Google Play) doesn't replace risks of these illiquid, poorly understood/disclosed investments. There have been significant defaults and some projects have totally collapsed (i.e. became worthless). Yieldstreet blames bad real estate market and higher interest rates for private investments started in 2021-22.

A new approach by Yieldstreet is to expand as broker-dealer and to offer funds (non-listed or listed) from established firms for platform fees. A new CEO started in 05/2025. So, a company can just change direction, replace the CEO, but if you lost money, you are out of luck.

Lesson - look deeply BEFORE investing, not AFTER.

CNBC News https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/18/yieldstreet-real-estate-bets-customer-losses.html
Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yieldstreet
Website https://www.yieldstreet.com/

yogibearbull

Situation got so bad that Yieldstreet name was hurting the company, so it changed its name to Willow Wealth last week. Web searches for Yieldstreet lead to URLs for Willow Wealth.

But one thing didn't change - continued investors losses from private real estate project defaults. It also removed historical performance data from its website because those were embarrassingly bad.

As for the fees charged for offering private investments from other firms, it layers its own fees on the top and total ERs for those may be 3.3-6.7% on Willow Wealth platform.

News https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/05/yieldstreet-investors-losses-willow-wealth-rebrand.html
Wiki https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willow_Wealth
New Website https://www.willowwealth.com/
Name Change https://www.willowwealth.com/blog/article/yieldstreet-is-becoming-willow-wealth

Sven

Situation got so bad that Yieldstreet name was hurting the company, so it changed its name to Willow Wealth last week. Web searches for Yieldstreet lead to URLs for Willow Wealth.

But one thing didn't change - continued investors losses from private real estate project defaults. It also removed historical performance data from its website because those were embarrassingly bad.

As for the fees charged for offering private investments from other firms, it layers its own fees on the top and total ERs for those may be 3.3-6.7% on Willow Wealth platform.

@yogibb, thank you. Very insightful indeed. I like to be the one to earn the 3.3-6.7% fee, but not the other way around.