This week, BlackRock CEO and Wall Street heavy Larry Fink released his 2025 annual letter to shareholders. The central message was that more wage-earning Americans should have “meaningful” opportunities to invest their income, particularly with regard to retirement savings, in higher-growth parts of the market.

You might have already caught Fink’s use of the phrase “market democratization” floating around headlines or on social media: the idea that more people, not just those with massive amounts of capital, should be able to play the stock market like the capitalist class. Rather than rely solely on traditional 401(k)s, which commonly grow slowly and remain limited in scope, Fink is advocating for broader access to investment opportunities that could build more substantial, long-term wealth for workers’ futures.Here’s the snippet from the letter that’s been getting attention:

Markets, like everything humans build, aren’t perfect. They reflect us — unfinished, sometimes flawed, but always improvable. The solution isn't to abandon markets; it's to expand them, to finish the market democratization that began 400 years ago and let more people own a meaningful stake in the growth happening around them.

In the letter Fink acknowledges that, despite years of strong market returns, large portions of the population are excluded from “meaningful” participation. His proposed solution in “unlocking private markets” to the everyman is twofold: open up previously “restricted” areas of the market to current investors, and make things easier for more people “to become investors in the first place.”

One of the biggest hurdles is private markets. Fink:

Private markets are, as their name suggests, private. For individual investors, they often require higher minimum investments. And even when the minimums are lower, investing is often limited to people with a certain income or net worth.

He argues that new technology (i.e. faster, more accurate data collection) could change that. By making private markets more transparent, it may create the potential to build more indexes for broader groups of investors, similar to what we’ve seen with the S&P 500. The shift could theoretically make private investing more accessible, manageable, and understandable for those who don’t have white-shoe law firms or a drove of financial wonks on speed dial.

This push isn’t exactly new. Last year, Fink’s letter (titled “Time to Rethink Retirement”) beat a similar drum about the tens of millions of Americans approaching retirement without enough savings who are approaching retirement without enough savings:

If more people could invest in the capital markets, it would create a virtuous economic cycle, fueling growth for companies and countries, which would, in turn, generate wealth for millions more people. 

Fink wants the everyday American to engage “meaningfully” with the market. We agree. But opening up private markets doesn’t help the millions who can’t afford to contribute to traditional 401(k)s as it is. So, what possible funds could the average worker scrounge up to invest, once they have access to more markets? (Technically speaking, BlackRock already offers more than 450 ETFs, so the access is largely there.) In other words: The capital required to take advantage of these opportunities is not within reach. Without addressing that, “market democratization” is only part of the solution.