A little more than five years ago, a self-directed IRA expert named Jim Jones reached out to me through LinkedIn to discuss the value proposition of the self-directed IRA — a retirement vehicle that gives individual investors greater control of their retirement capital and the freedom to invest beyond conventional asset classes and into coveted alternative investment products.

Jones — founder and CEO of IRAeXchange.net and the Self-Directed IRA Investment Institute — made contact with me after reading an article I had recently published that drew remarkable parallels between NASDAQ’s great rise and a new generation of venture platforms that were essentially “making markets” in young, private companies, including Facebook and Twitter. He described how a growing number of high-net-worth investors had begun turning to self-directed IRAs so that they could use their retirement dollars to invest in many of these hot, pre-IPO companies. As ti