Private Markets vs. Public Markets: What Each Actually Gives You

Public markets offer daily liquidity, abundant information and easy comparability. Private markets ask you to give up some liquidity in exchange for an illiquidity premium, less price noise and access to deal structures that simply do not exist on an exchange.

Neither is better. They answer different questions. The investor who blends them deliberately tends to end up with a portfolio that compounds more smoothly than one built from either alone.

The principle in this article applies everywhere, but the numbers do not. Cross-border investors face an additional set of variables — source-country withholding tax, treaty access, capital-gains treatment by residency, reporting obligations under CRS and FATCA, and the impact of holding structures on net IRR. Two investors taking identical positions can end up with materially different post-tax outcomes purely because of where they are resident and how they hold the asset.

Before committing to any cross-border deal, map the tax stack: corporate tax already paid at the asset level, withholding tax on outbound distributions (and whether a treaty reduces it), and personal or corporate tax in your residency. On Aqmār, the SPV jurisdiction, operating-asset jurisdiction, and standard distribution mechanics are disclosed in the deal pack so your tax adviser can model the post-tax return rather than reconstructing it from emails after the fact.