Opening Access to the World's Markets

All trading comes with preferences and bias. For many global investors, the default is to favor their home market [1]. The US equities market is 47.3% of the global market cap, so it makes sense that US investors hold 70-80% of their investments in US-based entities [2]. But in smaller markets the case for concentration is weaker: Australia comprises less than 2% of the FTSE All-World Index, yet Australians have an average allocation of over 52% in their domestic market – a home bias ratio of 26x [3]. This ratio, which describes the domestic investment allocation over the country's weight in the global index, exists in many developed markets: it's 6x in the UK, 4.3x in Japan [3]. So while investors buy products from around the world, their portfolios remain concentrated in their home markets – and not always for financial reasons. The question for many global investors isn't which global markets exist, but which they can reach.

What stands between investors and global markets is mostly administrative. For a European buying US shares, currency conversion is often the largest single cost, and it rarely arrives as a fee: brokers apply it as a markup on the exchange rate, from around 0.25% to as much as 1.5% on each leg [4]. Behind that sit a W-8BEN form to avoid 30% US withholding [5], and a separate custody arrangement for each market. Each step is small; together, they become the barrier.

Private markets (companies that are not publicly listed) are often closed by rule, not by price. Many countries have investor restrictions that prevent investment by non-accredited-investors [6]. In the US, these restrictions prevent 82% of households from accessing investment in pre-IPO companies. In other words, access to private markets is limited to investors who already have substantial personal wealth.

This is particularly meaningful amid a market that keeps delaying the IPO process, and lengthening the timeline before retail investors can access growth opportunities. In 1999, the median time from founding to IPO was just 4 years in the tech sector; in 2025, that had extended to 12 years [7]. The pool of listed companies has shrunk alongside it: the US had more than 8,000 listed companies at its 1996 peak, and about 4,000 by 2020 [8].

Crypto markets have meaningfully opened markets for digital assets, and are now expanding assets to RWAs, including global equities and even pre-IPO markets. While the ways of bringing these contract types to market vary (both in structure and by geographic availability), the trend line is toward giving more investors more access to global financial markets.

This trend is measurable: since launching in mid-2025, tokenized stocks scaled from $2.09 to $486.69 million in market capitalisation, reaching 2.5% of the $19.32bn total RWA market by the end of Q1 2026 [9]. Spot volume in tokenized stocks reached $15.12bn in the first quarter of 2026 alone, more than the previous two quarters combined [9]. Forecasts for the wider category run from $2tn-4tn by 2030 to more than $30tn by 2034 [10] – a spread driven more by differences in scope and time horizon than by disagreement over the direction of growth.

Tokenization is what makes an asset transferable. Distribution is what makes it available – and that is the harder half. A market can be fully tokenized and still reach almost nobody, if it sits behind the same funding steps, currency conversions and account structures as before. What changes the picture is how many people a market is actually put in front of, and how many markets sit in one place once they get there.

But breadth on its own isn't access, either. A market that's listed in many places but thinly traded costs the investor in spreads. Depth comes from how many people are trading the same book at the same time – which is why a genuinely global client base does more for access than another listing does.

Home bias was never really a conviction. It was a currency conversion, a withholding form, a custody chain and a minimum balance, arranged in a queue long enough that most investors stopped at the first market they reached. Last week the constraint was when markets were open. This week it is what you can reach – and that constraint is also easing.

[1] CFA Institute, "Home Bias: The Hidden Cost of Staying Close to Home," 2026. https://rpc.cfainstitute.org/blogs/enterprising-investor/2026/home-bias-cost-staying-close-to-home

[2] AllianceBernstein, "Home Bias Could Be Costly for US Equity Investors." https://www.alliancebernstein.com/corporate/en/insights/investment-insights/home-bias-could-be-costly-for-us-equity-investors.html

[3] FTSE Russell research, via State Street Global Advisors, "Home Bias in Australian Equity Allocations," October 2024. https://www.ssga.com/library-content/assets/pdf/apac/insights/2024/home-bias-in-australian-equity-allocations.pdf

[4] Investing in the Web, "Best Brokers for US Stocks in Europe," 2026. https://investingintheweb.com/blog/best-brokers-for-us-stocks-in-europe/

[5] US Internal Revenue Service, Form W-8BEN. https://www.irs.gov/forms-pubs/about-form-w-8-ben

[6] US Securities and Exchange Commission, Regulation D Rule 501(a). https://www.sec.gov/resources-small-businesses/capital-raising-building-blocks/accredited-investors

[7] Jay R. Ritter, University of Florida, "Initial Public Offerings: Median Age of IPOs Through 2025." https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/files/IPOs-Age-of-Companies-Going-Public.pdf

[8] Tuck School of Business, "Where Did All the Public Companies Go?"; Meketa, "The Decreasing Number of Public Companies," 2024. https://tuck.dartmouth.edu/news/articles/where-did-all-the-public-companies-go

[9] CoinGecko, RWA Report 2026. https://www.coingecko.com/research/publications/rwa-report-2026

[10] a16z crypto, "7 Charts: Tokenized assets have proved the concept. Now comes the hard part." https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/article/tokenized-asset-rwa-market-data-charts/

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