Private Markets Restore Broker Commissions

Zero commission turned public stock trading into a low margin traffic driver, which is why private markets matter so much to brokerages. Once Robinhood pushed the market toward payment for order flow, incumbents had to drop the old $5 to $10 stock ticket charges and look elsewhere for economics. Private deals bring back explicit distribution fees, often through a one time sales load that is orders of magnitude richer than PFOF on the same invested dollars.

• In Monark's model, an investor putting in $100,000 may pay a 5% upfront fee, with roughly $95,000 reaching the underlying SPV after the fee is deducted. That pool is then split with brokerage partners, usually around 50 50 after admin costs, creating a real commission line again.
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• The contrast with modern public brokerage economics is stark. Robinhood style free trading moved monetization to the back end, where brokers sell order flow to market makers. That made trading feel free to the customer, but it also compressed the broker's take rate to a tiny fraction of volume.
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• This helps explain why embedded brokerage and wealth platforms keep adding alts. Monark describes private assets as a high margin business line for retail brokerages and RIAs, while platforms like Alpaca and Apex show the public market alternative, where economics come from commissions, margin, sweeps, and routing revenue spread across infrastructure layers.
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The next phase is brokerages treating private assets less like a niche add on and more like a core revenue engine. As private investing gets wired into existing brokerage accounts, statements, and custody workflows, the winning platforms will be the ones that can make private products feel as easy to buy as stocks, while keeping the much fatter fee pool that public trading no longer offers.