Last month, President Trump signed an executive order opening the door for Americans to put private equity and other alternative assets into their 401(k)s. The order is being promoted under the friendly banner of “Democratizing Access to Alternative Assets for 401(k) Investors.” But what’s being billed as a victory for Main Street is really just a windfall for Wall Street—with ordinary investors left holding the bag.

For decades, private equity has been a favorite of pension funds, endowments, and sovereign wealth funds, promising high returns with low volatility. But the reality is far less glamorous: the industry is loaded with fees, the returns rarely match the hype, and the assets are notoriously illiquid. Sometimes, you literally can’t sell them.  Yale recently sold off part of its private equity portfolio at a 10% discount in a deal where buyers could cherry-pick the funds they wanted—translation: the assets sold were the good ones.

So why are private equity firms interested in your 401(k)? Simple: institutional investors are largely tapped out, and there’s roughly $13 trillion in U.S. defined contribution plans just waiting to be accessed. The industry lobbied hard to make this happen.  Not because exposure to alternative assets will help you retire more comfortably, but because private equity managers need new revenue streams and your retirement savings can be the industry’s next growth engine.

The risks are obvious. Private equity is a debt-heavy industry.  These funds often use 100–200% debt per dollar of equity, compared to about 50% for publicly traded companies. Higher debt leads to higher volatility and risk.  While private equity outperformed large cap stocks by 2% per year for the last three decades, the outperformance was due to the leverage effect of debt, not fantastic investment decisions. You could have achieved similar results by simply buying the S&P 500 and layering on a bit of leverage. The historical outperformance of private equity was never a reflection of skill—it came from cheap debt and rising valuation multiples. Now, debt is expensive, and multiples are near all-time highs.

And then there are the fees. Accessing private equity in your 401(k) will likely be complex, opaque, and very expensive.  Returns that look impressive on paper are often swallowed by management fees, carried interest, and other assorted charges.

As a wise investor and friend once put it: by the time an investment has been chopped into $5,000 pieces to be sold, you are usually in the final act.  So, while Trump’s executive might sound like a gift to retail investors, it’s really a gift to the private equity industry: new customers to harvest, new fees to collect, and fresh “exit liquidity” to deal with their recent liquidity challenges.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.