When the high-profile initial public offerings of Spotify and Dropbox roll out in the coming weeks, we’ll all be reminded once again of a major Wall Street shortcoming.

That is, Wall Street continues to have a big one-percenter problem. There are those with gold-plated brokerage accounts who can get access to IPO shares. And then there is everyone else.

This matters because the shares of hot IPOs regularly pop several points above their IPO prices on the first day of trading, showering the gift of instant profits on the privileged few who get IPO shares in advance.

I have a fix for this. It’s not perfect, but it’s a way to get exposure to pre IPO shares. It’s called GSV Capital US:GSVC. Buying shares of this company is not a perfect fix. It has shortcomings, which I will get to in a moment. But it gets the job done to a large degree.

GSV Capital is an investment company that specialized in buying shares of promising companies in the years before they do an IPO. (The GSV stand for “Global Silicon Valley.”) When you buy shares of this company, you get exposure to some of the most promising early-stage companies in the hottest investing spaces, such as cloud computing, artificial intelligence, big data and augmented reality.

At a recent price of $8, the shares for GSV Capital traded at a 17% discount to the company’s net asset value (NAV) of $9.69 reported for the third quarter of last year. The NAV is the company’s computed value of all of its holdings. So, theoretically, if you bought the stock at $8, you picked up that basket of pre-IPO companies at a 17% discount.

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Sounds interesting, but why the discount? It’s probably because GSV Capital is off the radar for most people. On the last conference call, it got zero questions. This is partly because it is small. Which brings up a key point.

Don’t buy above $8

GSV Capital has a minuscule market value of $170 million. So columns like this one can move the shares. I don’t want you to buy any spike in GSV Capital caused by this column only to be disappointed as the price move wears off and the shares reverse. I don’t know that this will happen, but it is certainly possible.

I suggest buying this as a medium-term hold, but it’s also a potentially good trading vehicle. That’s because it attracts attention whenever one of its major holdings files to do an IPO or carries it out. This can provide a tradable bump. GSV Capital, for example, reversed the discount to its NAV to trade at a premium around the time of the IPOs of its Facebook FB, -1.73% and Twitter TWTR, -0.62% holdings.

A look under the hood

Here are the top five investments that accounted for 48% of the portfolio’s fair value at the end of the third quarter (the most recent filing), and some other interesting holdings.

Spotify

Popular streaming-music service Spotify Technology SA SPOT, +2.33% produced 39% sales growth and 46% paid user growth last year, says Cory Murphy, an analyst with Renaissance Capital, which provides professional investors with research on pre-IPO companies. So it could attract a lot of attention when it does its IPO — in this case a direct listing. Murphy expects that to happen later this month. Investor and media interest in Spotify could put a bid under GSV Capital shares around the IPO. Spotify represents 15% of its portfolio, making it the No. 3 holding.

Read about Spotify’s IPO: Five things to know about its direct listing

Dropbox

Another IPO in the process of getting cued up, Dropbox offers cloud-based digital-file sharing and storage. Dropbox posted 31% revenue growth and 25% paid user growth last year, says Murphy. This tells me it could be a popular IPO that could also put a bid under GSV Capital shares. Dropbox is 8% of the GSV Capital portfolio, making it the No. 5 holding. Dropbox has a good pedigree. Investors recently in this name included Sequoia Capital, Goldman Sachs GS, -0.44% , BlackRock BLK, -0.77% , Morgan Stanley MS, -3.43% and T. Rowe Price TROW, -2.52% .

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Palantir Technologies

This Peter Thiel-backed “big data” company helps U.S. spies analyze intelligence data and battlefield commanders manage information flow. In the private sector it helps pharmaceutical companies drill down on data from drug trials. It helps manufacturers analyze complex data gleaned from high-tech assembly lines and manage supply chains. And investors use Palantir systems to glean market intelligence. Customers include Airbus EADSY, -6.43% , insurance company Axa AXAHY, -3.20% , Merck MRK, -3.12% , BP BP, -2.96% , Deutsche Bank DB, -8.25% and GlaxoSmithKline GSK, -2.67% .

Palantir should go public by 2020, says Murphy at Renaissance Capital, which also manages the IPO exchange traded fund Renaissance IPO ETF IPO, +1.00% . But the IPO could happen sooner than that. Palantir represents 17% of GSV Capital’s portfolio, making it the No. 1 holding.

Lyft

This “ride sharing” platform posted great growth last year in part because of the various controversies at competitor Uber, says Murphy. Lyft has been vague about when it might do an IPO. But media reports last September suggested it was close to selecting its IPO advisers, so it could IPO later this year, says Murphy. It’s 4% of GSV Capital holdings.

JAMF Holdings

This company sells software that helps IT departments configure and manage the apps they put on Apple AAPL, +3.03% devices used by employees. Customers include IBM IBM, -2.04% . GSV Capital announced last fall that JAMF agreed to be purchased by Vista Equity Partners. GSV Capital said it expects a 3.5-fold return on its investment. We should get an update when GSV Capital reports earnings March 15. A solid return here could boost NAV meaningfully since JAMF was 17% of its investment portfolio at the end of the third quarter.

Coursera

Founded in 2012 by two Stanford University professors, this company offers online courses, including many from prestigious universities like Stanford, Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania. Besides classes open to the public, it offers in-house training courses at companies like IBM, Bank of New York Mellon BK, -4.04% , Axa, L’Oréal LRLCY, -2.10% and Boston Consulting. The company went through a management shakeup late last year, and it will need to get beyond that before it can go public, says Murphy. This is 9% of GSV Capital’s portfolio.

Lytro

This tech company thinks it is about to revolutionize the film and artificial-reality sectors with its “light field technology.” How does it work? Lytro CEO Jason Rosenthal explained it this way in a GSV Capital meeting: “We capture every ray of light going through a scene. Where it is coming from. What angle, and where it is going.” All the data can be manipulated after filming to customize scenes and add effects. “So instead of a flat image, we can create an accurate 3D model of the entire environment,” says Rosenthal. “It gives artists a whole new level of creativity. It turns every scene into a highly accurate 3D model.” Lytro, which makes up 5% of the GSV Capital holdings, sells cameras and software to make it all happen.

Other catalysts

Other GSV Capital holdings include StormWind in corporate IT training (7% of its portfolio); General Assembly and Course Hero in online education (6% and 5%); SugarCRM, which offers customer-relationship management like Salesforce.com CRM, +0.93% (3%); and Dataminr, which gives users news and data alerts from Twitter and other sources (2%).

Besides those companies, GSV Capital runs a Silicon Valley “incubator” called GSVlabs which contains around 170 start-ups. The company could also benefit from the recent tax-law overhaul, which might allow it to reverse some deferred tax liabilities, and it has been buying back shares.

Drawbacks and risks

GSV Capital investments are selected by analysts at GSV Asset Management, which is run by GSV Capital CEO Michael Moe. Before his current job, Moe co-founded the venture-capital firm ThinkEquity Partners, and he worked at Merrill Lynch.

Moe and his team think they are pretty good at spotting talent and promising companies. But selecting early stage companies is no easy task. The team is bound to make mistakes that will hurt you if you own GSV Capital shares.

Moe and his colleagues, for example, invested in Snap SNAP, +0.25% and Twitter, two companies that have failed to work out for investors like Facebook, at least so far. GSV Capital recently sold two companies, Bloom Energy and Gilt Group, for a combined loss of almost $7 million. GSV Capital NAV fell 9% to $10.96 in the first quarter of 2016 because it had to mark down the value of Palantir Technologies and Twitter positions.

None of this helped GSV Capital shareholders.

I gave GSV Capital a chance to talk about their failures. They declined to respond. But if they had, they might have pointed out that what goes down also goes up. The company’s NAV advanced 9.7% to $9.69 in the third quarter of last year, compared with March 31, 2017. Such ups and downs are part of the wild world of venture-capital investing, and you’ll have to get used to them if you own shares of this company.

At the time of publication, Michael Brush had no positions in any stocks mentioned in this column. Brush has suggested FB, MRK, BP and GSK in his stock newsletter, Brush Up on Stocks. Brush is a Manhattan-based financial writer who has covered business for the New York Times and The Economist group, and he attended Columbia Business School in the Knight-Bagehot program.