SecondMarket, the largest secondary market for private company stock, and StockTwits, an open, community-powered idea and information service for investments, announced today a collaboration that allows SecondMarket's participants to view StockTwits' real-time stock conversations about the leading private companies on the SecondMarket platform.
SecondMarket's private company stock market allows shareholders of high growth, venture-backed private companies to sell their shares prior to an IPO or M&A transaction. The StockTwits live feed will stream into the hundreds of private company information pages that are available on the SecondMarket platform, allowing SecondMarket participants to follow the real-time conversations.
"We are excited to deliver to our close-knit financial community at StockTwits the capability to comment on an entire network of private companies," said StockTwits CEO Howard Lindzon. "What sets StockTwits apart is the ability to offer unparalleled financial tools and resources to our community, and this collaboration with SecondMarket will allow StockTwits' users to become more educated participants in the private company market."
"This is an exciting collaboration for us," said SecondMarket Founder and CEO Barry Silbert. "Adding real-time dialogues about private companies to our platform provides an important mechanism to enhance the user experience, while also providing additional information to allow our buyers and sellers to make more informed investment decisions."
This is the first step in developing an ongoing relationship between StockTwits and SecondMarket. StockTwits is incorporating SecondMarket's proprietary private company ticker symbols into the StockTwits database. As SecondMarket expands its universe of private company information pages and corresponding ticker symbols, StockTwits will also add those companies into its system. SecondMarket currently tracks nearly 500 of the leading start-ups around the world.
SecondMarket has completed $300 million in transactions in some of the world's leading venture-backed private companies. In addition to private company stock, several other asset classes are traded on SecondMarket, including limited partnership interests in private equity and real estate funds, structured products (ARS, ABS, MBS and CDOs), whole loans, bankruptcy claims and restricted securities in public companies. More than $30 billion in assets are currently available for sale on SecondMarket. It is free to access SecondMarket.