The Wealthy are Leaving the Public Markets in Favor of Private Markets. Here’s Why.

Thesis summary

This 2022 article drew together several threads that had run through the earlier writing on this site — the economy-wide arrival of artificial intelligence, the acceleration of biotechnology and gene editing, and, above all, the observation that an increasing share of value creation in emerging technology companies was taking place in the private markets, before those companies ever reached a public listing.

The piece argued that recognizing a structural technology transition is only half of the problem. The harder half is *access*: the companies positioned to benefit from these transitions are increasingly financed privately, and access to the strongest venture opportunities is constrained and heavily intermediated. That reality pointed toward the need for a disciplined, repeatable approach to private-market selection — one grounded in institutional validation and the decomposition of risk rather than in narrative alone. In the vocabulary used elsewhere on this site, these ideas later cohered into the Three Trigger Methodology.

Historical context

The article was written as these observations converged into the investment approach pursued at Covenant. Because the original document contains historical performance figures, return comparisons, and related material that require compliance review before publication, the full article is not reproduced here. What appears above is a compliance-safe summary of its central argument and the role it played in the evolution of the underlying thinking.