Private Share Sales Getting Bigger
An IPO market return won’t kill off private share trading sites. But it could cause a broader shift from buy-and-hold investments to more arbitrage-type transactions, with investors looking to profit from spreads between public and private valuations. So says Greg Brogger, CEO of SharesPost, the five-month-old site for buying and selling private company stock. The company just launched a new set of analyst reports on some closely watched venture-backed companies. When I spoke to Brogger, about the announcement, he told me that the site is also seeing a big increase in the size of transactions. “When we started, the average transaction size was $5k to $50k,” Brogger explains. But over the last few transactions, he adds, the size has increased substantially, to $200k to $250k.
