Monday, April 2, 2012

Secondary Exchange SecondMarket Cuts 10 Percent Due To Facebook Halt

Secondary private stock trading exchange SecondMarket cut 10 percent of its staff Friday, as a direct result of Facebook halting trading of its stock on secondary exchanges, in a reflection of how much of a percent of Facebook has represented the business of the private marketplace. SecondMarket--along with competitor SharePost, the secondary stock trading exchange started by Greg Brogger and Scott Painter started out of Santa Monica-based incubator Brighthouse--had relied in a large extent on an unusually large volume of offerings of Facebook's stock, with Facebook by far dominating the active trading on the sites. It's unclear how Facebook's move last week will affect SharesPost. Users of SecondMarket and SharesPost were informed last week of the move by Facebook, which said it wanted to have an "orderly transition to the public markets." Both SharesPost and SecondMarket were started to provide some liquidity to investors in private companies, in the face of hurdles to reach IPO liquidity.

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