December 8, 2025 • 11 mins
From private credit to private equity, gold and real estate, alternatives are now playing a greater role in portfolio diversification. It's a story playing out in the US, where there is $US46 trillion in retirement savings, with about $17 trillion of that held in IRAs, or Individual Retirement Accounts.
Henry Yoshida, co-founder and CEO of Rocket Dollar, joins Sean Aylmer to unpack where US retirement money is flowing, what’s driving demand, and why he says the classic 60–40 portfolio no longer works in today’s markets.
Rocket Dollar is a supporter of Fear & Greed.
This is general information only. You should seek advice tailored to your circumstances before making investment decisions.
Find out more: https://fearandgreed.com.au/
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
Welcome to Fearing Greed Q and A where we ask
and answer questions about business, investing, economics, politics and more.
I'm Suan Aylmer. US President Donald Trump recently praised the
Australian superannuation system as a good plan that's worked out
very well, saying he's looking at it very seriously. But
in the United States there's already almost sixty four trillion
(00:26):
US dollars in retirement savings, with about seventeen trillion of
that held in iria's or independent retirement accounts. Helping invest
that money is exactly what today's guest does. Henry Yeshida
is the CEO and co founder of US fintech Rocket Dollar,
a great supporter of this podcast. Rocket Dollar allows US
investors to purchase alternative or private investments using their retirement accounts.
(00:50):
It's a bit like an Australian DII or a self
managed super fund account. Remember this is all general information.
You should seek professional advice for making investment decisions.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Henry, Welcome to Fear in Greed Q and a.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Thank you very much, Jeam, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Look.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
First up, there's a great debate in Australia or about
what retirees should invest in. There are rules and regulations,
but broadly DIY funds or iras as you call them,
can invest in alternatives. From your viewpoint, how much freedom
should the owner of an IRA or the Australian DIY
superfund have?
Speaker 3 (01:25):
It may be a little bit needs to be commensurate
with the experience level and the comfort level and the
level risk that an individual's willing to take on. But
if they're comfortable with that risk and it's their money,
I think my position, in my company's position, is that
people should be fully authorized to invest in what they
like and what they think will best suit them in retirement.
And you know, hopefully that attitude is starting to come
(01:47):
to pass in the United States, but it's actually very
very early, not quite as advanced as where you are.
But that's just my personal belief. People should be allowed
to invest their funds in whatever they choose to invest
in for retirement.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Okay, so iras and then alternative investments within iras. How
I mean, do most people put their money in term
deposits and bonds and equities or you know, how big
is that all the alternative investment part for iras.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
The alternative investment part in the US is very very tiny. So,
as you mentioned in the introduction, there's seventeen trillion dollars
that are in individual retirement accounts. So that's when an
individual has control of the moneyes that they may have
accumulated to a large degree in a company sponsored plan
or a government sponsored plan and now they have their
own direct control. But of that seventeen trillion, even though
(02:36):
this industry we call it self directed IRA industry in
the United States has been around for almost fifty years,
as long as the retirement plans themselves, it still only
represents about one to one and a half to two
percent of all of the seventeen trillion in IRA, so
really only two hundred to maybe four hundred billion.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
It's high end, okay.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
So within that alternative investment universe, I want to start
talking private credit in Australia. I've had our regulator here
has done a very big report recently on private credit,
or on public and private markets more generally, including private
credit and whether they should be regulated.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Or not, etc.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Is it a tie that you just can't hold back
private credit? I mean, where is private credit going?
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Well? I think before I answer that question, I do
want to say that I think that all investments have
some level of regulation. Now, just because something may not
be regulated as your typical listed equities market, that means
that that doesn't, by virtue, just indicate that it's not regulated.
It's just regulated in a different way or regulated to
a lesser degree because the market it self just quite
may not be that mature. But the second part your
(03:39):
actual question is that I recently gave some comments that no,
I don't think it's it's going to go away. I
think that it's going to continue to gain more market
share in twenty twenty six, especially here in the United States,
and the amount of market share that I expect private
credit to gain in twenty twenty six will actually be
in excess to what they've gained in the last three
to five years combined, and that's already been pretty tremendous growth.
(04:00):
I just think that it's here to stay. That you
have on the one side, investors who are yield starved,
and then you have individuals, institutions and projects that actually
need the funding. So when you have this sort of
win win on both sides of a marketplace, there's nowhere
to go demand, is there both sides of the party.
Both parties are interested in doing this, so this market
is going to continue to grow. And in the United States,
(04:21):
this market is actually still supported by a large a
lot of the large incomebent financial services institutions, so they
themselves are involved in private credit, which is another validation
point for me to think that it's just going to
continue to grow as well.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Why they because, certainly in Australia banking because often because
of regulatory action, it's just harder to lend to that
middle market. Is how a banks in the US involved
in private credit.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
So the banks themselves are participating in this, so they're
choosing themselves. It's very similar in the equity side, where
companies are still working with large incumbent and financial institutions, banks,
investment banks and so forth, but they're working with them
in a different way other than just going to an
initial public offering or in this case of public bond
offering in the fixed income space for credit purposes. So
(05:09):
the large banks are still involved. And what's really making
this market grow is again people are able to circumvent
in the middle market banks that want to serve these institutions.
The reason why it's been going slow is not so
much because there hasn't been demanded. It's actually just kind
of hard to find the opportunities and match up let's
say an organization or an institution that's looking to get
(05:29):
that credit, and then a middle market bank for them
to find that institution to give the credit too. So
I would say it's a lack of velocity in identifying
the matches needed for transaction to take place, more than
probably regulatory items that slow this down.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Okay, private equity, what's your taket? Certainly here and I'm
sure it's the same in the US. A lot of
dry padder in private equity at the moment. People have
saying struggle to deploy, but struggle to find the opportunities
that they want, and also struggle to exit. In Australia
as well, what's the outlok for private equity.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Well, you know, exits people got a little bit spoiled.
So I think that you know, people had expectations that
exit opportunities would come faster than they normally would, but
you know, back to reality, these are long cycle investments.
They take time, and you're right, there is a build
up of dry powder which I think will get deployed
in twenty twenty six and beyond in the near future
because a couple of things. One, there's pressure from the
(06:27):
limited partners who've provided this private equity that hey, you
can't just sit on the sidelines and not deploy the
capital that we gave to you. We gave it to
here for growth purposes. You need to go find these opportunities.
And at the same time, the private equity operators and
the issuers themselves are in a position now where they're
great discounts. So like in a lot of investment markets
right now, there's opportunities in almost every asset class except
(06:47):
maybe publicly listed securities in the United States, to purchase
at an opportunity and at a discount to even ten twelve,
twenty twenty five months ago. Other than public equities, I
would venture to guess that almost all asset classes are
actually trading at a discount to what they might have
been two years ago.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Okay, that leads me to gold as an asset class
that has.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Okay, maybe another one that hasn't had that.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Yes, the extension of the real but you are a
belavor in gold, you still think it's got further to run.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
I do, so I've given lots of comments in gold
in twenty twenty four and twenty twenty five, and have
just been kind of calling new all time highs along
the way. It's just kind of the perfect storm of
inflation that just doesn't seem to go away no matter
what we do, whether it's deploying the tried and true,
you know, rate cuts, it's just continuing to linger on.
You overlay that against just some sort of global macroeconomic
(07:41):
uncertainty type of scenario or conflict around the world. At
the same time, it's just pushing central banks to purchase more.
Central banks purchase more. Price gets pushed up. Individuals have
easier and broader access to go into precious metals, so
that again is pushing the price pricing pressure up, and
I think that'll continue to happen in twenty twenty six.
And I've been telling people that when you see temporary
(08:02):
pullbacks in the price, that's when you might look at
entry opportunities if you've never actually established a position before,
and that's usually the case with an individual investor, not
so much a central banker and institution, but any temporary
price pullback might present an opportunity as an entry point
to begin some diversification to that asset class.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Okay, real estate, and I mean location, location, location. We
love our real estate here.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
A lot of DIY funds have real estate within the
funds in the US at least, though, you think that
it will be a great opportunity the next twelve months
or sir.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
Well, I think that right now, and even myself, I'm
actually closing on just a single investment property next week,
in just a few days now I think about it,
so my closing date is coming up. Some allocating funds
to that. But I think that people will look back
ten years from now and look at it as the
single greatest opportunity to have entered some place in the
real estate market. It would be in twenty twenty five,
(08:57):
twenty twenty six, just like it was in two thousand,
two thousand and eight. So you talk to anyone in
the year twenty fifteen to twenty twenty, if they purchased
or entered in two thousand and eight to twenty ten,
they felt like it was just a great opportunity. And
I'd probably say that. You know, location, location, location used
to be the three key factors for real estate, but
I think it might be now location, location, and entry
value might be the third one.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Okay, let's bring this all together. If I'm investing in
twenty twenty six in my DII fund or an IRA
in the US, is it time to move more into
alternatives away from the whole sixty forty kind of theme
which seems to have been.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Held water for decades? Really, but is it time to
move on?
Speaker 3 (09:43):
Is it has been time to move on? And this
has been a secular trend that's been happening since the
turn of the century. When I started my career in
the financial services industry, there were three times as many
publicly traded listed securities in the United States as there
are today now. Oddly enough, the package products ETFs some
mutual funds have act actually now have tripled the amount
of listings out there as there are publicly traded stocks.
(10:04):
And that sixty forty portfolio the forty always represented public
fixed income investments as a diversified and non correlated asset
to your public equities. Well, mathematically that has been less
and less the case over the last twenty twenty five,
twenty six years now in this century. So if you
are truly trying to achieve portfolio diversification, now whether you
have an opinion on whether alternative investments are right or wrong, dangerous, risky, unregulated,
(10:30):
whatever that opinion may be of your own. If you
were looking for pure diversification purposes, you have to go
somewhere where you can go into an investment that would
zag when the stock market zigs. And right now, public
fixed income has not been the case for the last
twenty five years, and that's been declining over time, and
you have to go elsewhere in the place to go.
The only place to go, probably at this point, would
(10:51):
be non listed private investments. So some of the asset
classes we talked about precious metals, private equity, private credit,
and just general alternative and private investments, which is what
we represent at rocket Dollar and what we allow our
customers to do.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Henry, thank you for talking to Hear and Greed.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Thank you, Thanks Sean.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
As Henry Ishida, co founder of Rocket Dollar, a great
supporter of this podcast joining me from Austin, Texas. And
a reminder to seek your own advice before making investment decisions.
If you've got something you'd like to know, then send
through your question on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or at Fearinggreed
dot com dot a you. I'm Chanelmer, and this is
fear and greed, Q and DA
Welcome to Fearing Greed Q and A where we ask
and answer questions about business, investing, economics, politics and more.
I'm Suan Aylmer. US President Donald Trump recently praised the
Australian superannuation system as a good plan that's worked out
very well, saying he's looking at it very seriously. But
in the United States there's already almost sixty four trillion
(00:26):
US dollars in retirement savings, with about seventeen trillion of
that held in iria's or independent retirement accounts. Helping invest
that money is exactly what today's guest does. Henry Yeshida
is the CEO and co founder of US fintech Rocket Dollar,
a great supporter of this podcast. Rocket Dollar allows US
investors to purchase alternative or private investments using their retirement accounts.
(00:50):
It's a bit like an Australian DII or a self
managed super fund account. Remember this is all general information.
You should seek professional advice for making investment decisions.
Speaker 2 (00:59):
Henry, Welcome to Fear in Greed Q and a.
Speaker 3 (01:01):
Thank you very much, Jeam, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (01:03):
Look.
Speaker 1 (01:03):
First up, there's a great debate in Australia or about
what retirees should invest in. There are rules and regulations,
but broadly DIY funds or iras as you call them,
can invest in alternatives. From your viewpoint, how much freedom
should the owner of an IRA or the Australian DIY
superfund have?
Speaker 3 (01:25):
It may be a little bit needs to be commensurate
with the experience level and the comfort level and the
level risk that an individual's willing to take on. But
if they're comfortable with that risk and it's their money,
I think my position, in my company's position, is that
people should be fully authorized to invest in what they
like and what they think will best suit them in retirement.
And you know, hopefully that attitude is starting to come
(01:47):
to pass in the United States, but it's actually very
very early, not quite as advanced as where you are.
But that's just my personal belief. People should be allowed
to invest their funds in whatever they choose to invest
in for retirement.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
Okay, so iras and then alternative investments within iras. How
I mean, do most people put their money in term
deposits and bonds and equities or you know, how big
is that all the alternative investment part for iras.
Speaker 3 (02:15):
The alternative investment part in the US is very very tiny. So,
as you mentioned in the introduction, there's seventeen trillion dollars
that are in individual retirement accounts. So that's when an
individual has control of the moneyes that they may have
accumulated to a large degree in a company sponsored plan
or a government sponsored plan and now they have their
own direct control. But of that seventeen trillion, even though
(02:36):
this industry we call it self directed IRA industry in
the United States has been around for almost fifty years,
as long as the retirement plans themselves, it still only
represents about one to one and a half to two
percent of all of the seventeen trillion in IRA, so
really only two hundred to maybe four hundred billion.
Speaker 2 (02:51):
It's high end, okay.
Speaker 1 (02:52):
So within that alternative investment universe, I want to start
talking private credit in Australia. I've had our regulator here
has done a very big report recently on private credit,
or on public and private markets more generally, including private
credit and whether they should be regulated.
Speaker 2 (03:08):
Or not, etc.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Is it a tie that you just can't hold back
private credit? I mean, where is private credit going?
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Well? I think before I answer that question, I do
want to say that I think that all investments have
some level of regulation. Now, just because something may not
be regulated as your typical listed equities market, that means
that that doesn't, by virtue, just indicate that it's not regulated.
It's just regulated in a different way or regulated to
a lesser degree because the market it self just quite
may not be that mature. But the second part your
(03:39):
actual question is that I recently gave some comments that no,
I don't think it's it's going to go away. I
think that it's going to continue to gain more market
share in twenty twenty six, especially here in the United States,
and the amount of market share that I expect private
credit to gain in twenty twenty six will actually be
in excess to what they've gained in the last three
to five years combined, and that's already been pretty tremendous growth.
(04:00):
I just think that it's here to stay. That you
have on the one side, investors who are yield starved,
and then you have individuals, institutions and projects that actually
need the funding. So when you have this sort of
win win on both sides of a marketplace, there's nowhere
to go demand, is there both sides of the party.
Both parties are interested in doing this, so this market
is going to continue to grow. And in the United States,
(04:21):
this market is actually still supported by a large a
lot of the large incomebent financial services institutions, so they
themselves are involved in private credit, which is another validation
point for me to think that it's just going to
continue to grow as well.
Speaker 1 (04:33):
Why they because, certainly in Australia banking because often because
of regulatory action, it's just harder to lend to that
middle market. Is how a banks in the US involved
in private credit.
Speaker 3 (04:47):
So the banks themselves are participating in this, so they're
choosing themselves. It's very similar in the equity side, where
companies are still working with large incumbent and financial institutions, banks,
investment banks and so forth, but they're working with them
in a different way other than just going to an
initial public offering or in this case of public bond
offering in the fixed income space for credit purposes. So
(05:09):
the large banks are still involved. And what's really making
this market grow is again people are able to circumvent
in the middle market banks that want to serve these institutions.
The reason why it's been going slow is not so
much because there hasn't been demanded. It's actually just kind
of hard to find the opportunities and match up let's
say an organization or an institution that's looking to get
(05:29):
that credit, and then a middle market bank for them
to find that institution to give the credit too. So
I would say it's a lack of velocity in identifying
the matches needed for transaction to take place, more than
probably regulatory items that slow this down.
Speaker 1 (05:45):
Okay, private equity, what's your taket? Certainly here and I'm
sure it's the same in the US. A lot of
dry padder in private equity at the moment. People have
saying struggle to deploy, but struggle to find the opportunities
that they want, and also struggle to exit. In Australia
as well, what's the outlok for private equity.
Speaker 3 (06:05):
Well, you know, exits people got a little bit spoiled.
So I think that you know, people had expectations that
exit opportunities would come faster than they normally would, but
you know, back to reality, these are long cycle investments.
They take time, and you're right, there is a build
up of dry powder which I think will get deployed
in twenty twenty six and beyond in the near future
because a couple of things. One, there's pressure from the
(06:27):
limited partners who've provided this private equity that hey, you
can't just sit on the sidelines and not deploy the
capital that we gave to you. We gave it to
here for growth purposes. You need to go find these opportunities.
And at the same time, the private equity operators and
the issuers themselves are in a position now where they're
great discounts. So like in a lot of investment markets
right now, there's opportunities in almost every asset class except
(06:47):
maybe publicly listed securities in the United States, to purchase
at an opportunity and at a discount to even ten twelve,
twenty twenty five months ago. Other than public equities, I
would venture to guess that almost all asset classes are
actually trading at a discount to what they might have
been two years ago.
Speaker 2 (07:05):
Okay, that leads me to gold as an asset class
that has.
Speaker 3 (07:09):
Okay, maybe another one that hasn't had that.
Speaker 1 (07:11):
Yes, the extension of the real but you are a
belavor in gold, you still think it's got further to run.
Speaker 3 (07:17):
I do, so I've given lots of comments in gold
in twenty twenty four and twenty twenty five, and have
just been kind of calling new all time highs along
the way. It's just kind of the perfect storm of
inflation that just doesn't seem to go away no matter
what we do, whether it's deploying the tried and true,
you know, rate cuts, it's just continuing to linger on.
You overlay that against just some sort of global macroeconomic
(07:41):
uncertainty type of scenario or conflict around the world. At
the same time, it's just pushing central banks to purchase more.
Central banks purchase more. Price gets pushed up. Individuals have
easier and broader access to go into precious metals, so
that again is pushing the price pricing pressure up, and
I think that'll continue to happen in twenty twenty six.
And I've been telling people that when you see temporary
(08:02):
pullbacks in the price, that's when you might look at
entry opportunities if you've never actually established a position before,
and that's usually the case with an individual investor, not
so much a central banker and institution, but any temporary
price pullback might present an opportunity as an entry point
to begin some diversification to that asset class.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Okay, real estate, and I mean location, location, location. We
love our real estate here.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
A lot of DIY funds have real estate within the
funds in the US at least, though, you think that
it will be a great opportunity the next twelve months
or sir.
Speaker 3 (08:35):
Well, I think that right now, and even myself, I'm
actually closing on just a single investment property next week,
in just a few days now I think about it,
so my closing date is coming up. Some allocating funds
to that. But I think that people will look back
ten years from now and look at it as the
single greatest opportunity to have entered some place in the
real estate market. It would be in twenty twenty five,
(08:57):
twenty twenty six, just like it was in two thousand,
two thousand and eight. So you talk to anyone in
the year twenty fifteen to twenty twenty, if they purchased
or entered in two thousand and eight to twenty ten,
they felt like it was just a great opportunity. And
I'd probably say that. You know, location, location, location used
to be the three key factors for real estate, but
I think it might be now location, location, and entry
value might be the third one.
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Okay, let's bring this all together. If I'm investing in
twenty twenty six in my DII fund or an IRA
in the US, is it time to move more into
alternatives away from the whole sixty forty kind of theme
which seems to have been.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
Held water for decades? Really, but is it time to
move on?
Speaker 3 (09:43):
Is it has been time to move on? And this
has been a secular trend that's been happening since the
turn of the century. When I started my career in
the financial services industry, there were three times as many
publicly traded listed securities in the United States as there
are today now. Oddly enough, the package products ETFs some
mutual funds have act actually now have tripled the amount
of listings out there as there are publicly traded stocks.
(10:04):
And that sixty forty portfolio the forty always represented public
fixed income investments as a diversified and non correlated asset
to your public equities. Well, mathematically that has been less
and less the case over the last twenty twenty five,
twenty six years now in this century. So if you
are truly trying to achieve portfolio diversification, now whether you
have an opinion on whether alternative investments are right or wrong, dangerous, risky, unregulated,
(10:30):
whatever that opinion may be of your own. If you
were looking for pure diversification purposes, you have to go
somewhere where you can go into an investment that would
zag when the stock market zigs. And right now, public
fixed income has not been the case for the last
twenty five years, and that's been declining over time, and
you have to go elsewhere in the place to go.
The only place to go, probably at this point, would
(10:51):
be non listed private investments. So some of the asset
classes we talked about precious metals, private equity, private credit,
and just general alternative and private investments, which is what
we represent at rocket Dollar and what we allow our
customers to do.
Speaker 2 (11:04):
Henry, thank you for talking to Hear and Greed.
Speaker 3 (11:06):
Thank you, Thanks Sean.
Speaker 1 (11:07):
As Henry Ishida, co founder of Rocket Dollar, a great
supporter of this podcast joining me from Austin, Texas. And
a reminder to seek your own advice before making investment decisions.
If you've got something you'd like to know, then send
through your question on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, or at Fearinggreed
dot com dot a you. I'm Chanelmer, and this is
fear and greed, Q and DA
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