Schwab Integrates Private Share Trading

These deals show private share trading is moving from a niche brokered service into a standard brokerage product. Schwab is not just buying volume, it is buying the market rails, issuer relationships, and transaction workflow needed to put pre IPO shares in front of a mass affluent client base. That matters because distribution has always been the bottleneck in secondaries, far more than investor interest.

• Forge built the institutional side of the market first. It launched in 2013, merged with SharesPost in 2020, and evolved from manual secondary matching into a larger private market platform. Schwab gets that infrastructure plus a retail and advisor funnel that Forge never had on its own.
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• The closest parallel is Morgan Stanley buying EquityZen. Morgan Stanley already has workplace equity administration and wealth distribution, so adding EquityZen lets it connect employee shareholders, issuer liquidity programs, and advisor demand inside one stack. Schwab is making the same vertical move from the brokerage side.
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• The hard part in private shares is not finding people who want SpaceX or Anthropic. It is clearing transfer restrictions, rights of first refusal, issuer approvals, and settlement. That is why scale is shifting toward vertically integrated players with custody, compliance, balance sheet, and owned distribution rather than standalone marketplaces.
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The next phase is private markets becoming a feature inside mainstream wealth accounts, not a separate destination. Independent platforms will keep innovating on product and retail UX, but the biggest incumbents now control the broadest pipes of assets, advisors, and workplace participants. That should expand demand sharply and pull the market toward fewer, larger, full stack operators.