Second Market – another facilitator for private company stock trades
Posted by sambasiva on August 15, 2010
Continuing the focus on avenues to acquire stock/shares of private firms that by definition don’t trade on public stock markets, lets look at ‘SecondMarket’
Second Market facilitates employees, ex-employees, founders, investors and others to look for buyers and offload shares of private firms. Buyers typically include Asset managers, Hedge funds, Venture capital funds and individual investors.
A report of the most recent Q2 2010 activity has been published here by Second Market. A few things that stand out are that the pool of companies which were traded is thin and Facebook accounts for a lion share of completed transactions. Nevertheless it still amounts to approx $50Million of total transactions across all firms. A few new entrants catching investors interest include eHarmony, Groupon, Huffington post, Mozilla and Skype with Groupon topping the charts of people’s interest.
Private company stock are not the only instruments whose sale/purchase is facilitated by Second Market. It also features various Fixed income instruments like Mortgage backed and other asset backed securities and other loans.
