Source: Willow WealthAs Yieldstreet tries to distance itself from a rocky past with a new name and ad campaign, its customers are dealing with a present reality that is increasingly dire.The private markets investing startup, freshly rebranded as Willow Wealth, last week informed customers of new defaults on real estate projects in Houston and Nashville, Tennessee, CNBC has learned.The letters, obtained and verified by CNBC, account for about $41 million in new losses. They come on the heels of $89 million in marine loan wipeouts disclosed in September and $78 million in losses revealed by CNBC in an August report.In total, Willow Wealth investors have lost at least $208 million, according to CNBC reporting.Willow Wealth also removed a decade of historical performance data from public view in recent weeks. A chart on the company’s website showing annualized returns of negative 2% for real estate investments from 2015 to 2025 — down from 9.4% gains just two years prior — has been taken down.”They had to change their name,” said Mark Williams, a professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business. “Their old name had negative value to it, so they’re trying to do a 2.0 to restart things. They’re also making it harder to uncover their poor performance by removing the stats, which is alarming.”The high-stakes rebranding is the latest chapter for a company that sought to empower retail investors, but instead left some of them saddled with deep losses and years of uncertainty.Under its former name, Willow Wealth — backed by prominent venture firms and buoyed by aggressive online marketing — had been the best known of a wave of American startups that promised to broaden access to the alternative investments that are the domain of institutions and rich families.But the still-unfolding collapse of its real estate funds demonstrates the risks the private markets hold for retail investors. By their very nature, private investments don’t trade on exchanges and lack standardized disclosures. That leaves investors especially reliant on private fund managers, both for information and to safeguard their interests for years while their money is locked up in deals.Private markets have gained in prominence this year after President Donald Trump signed an executive order to allow the investments in retirement plans.While critics say that opaque, illiquid investments with high management fees aren’t appropriate for ordinary investors, asset managers including BlackRock and Apollo Global Management see retail as a vast untapped pool of capital. Retirement giant …
