NASDAQ To Acquire Sharepost And Create The NASDAQ Private Exchange

NASDAQ acquires Sharepost

On Wednesday March 6, 2013, NASDAQ surprised the small cap and investment community when it announced it is acquiring Sharepost’s private company market place (PCMP) exchange and rebranding it the Nasdaq Private Exchange.

In December, 2011, I wrote a few blogs on PCMPs.  A PCMP is a trading platform, such as SharePost or SecondMarket that provides a market place for illiquid restricted securities, such as private company securities, 144 stock, debt instruments, warrants, and the like or alternative assets.  It is on a PCMP that pre-IPO Facebook, Groupon and LInkedin received their trading start.  Following the IPO of these large entities, and in particular Facebook, traffic and use of PCMP sites declines, but NASDAQ clearly believes the decline is temporary, and I agree.

Private Company Market Places

Each PCMP offers a fully automated back office, documentation, escrow, transfer and settlement support. Users open trading accounts, like they would with any other broker dealer.  The PCMP provider collects