Insights
Understand the private market
Plain-language education — how private transactions work, how valuation and pricing behave, and what selling actually involves.
Private-market glossary
251 terms — from ROFR and side pockets to UDFI and FBO titling — defined without the jargon and linked to the articles that teach them.
Browse →Building on custody rails
RIAs, law firms, and cap-table platforms all touch private-market transactions. The ones that build on custody rails stop re-inventing settlement — and stop owning its risks.
Read →Block trading in private markets
Moving ten million dollars of a private company is not a hundred retail trades stapled together. Size changes the information problem, the process, and the price.
Read →Employee equity in the decade of staying private
When companies IPO’d at year six, equity compensation was a straightforward promise. At year twelve-and-counting, every part of that promise has been renegotiated — mostly without the employees in the room.
Read →The economics of private-market fraud
Fraud concentrates where verification is expensive and stories are cheap. Private markets, unreformed, are precisely that habitat — which means the fix is economic, not exhortative.
Read →What a private-market index can — and cannot — be
Public indexes summarize thousands of continuous prices. A private-market index summarizes estimates. That doesn’t make it useless — it makes honesty about construction the entire product.
Read →How to read an index methodology
Every index publishes a methodology document. Ten minutes with it — and five questions — tell you more than a year of watching the line go up.
Read →Pricing private companies: a methodology primer
Any platform can print a number next to a company’s name. This paper describes what has to stand behind that number for it to deserve the space.
Read →Private shares in a retirement account
Long-duration assets, long-duration money: the pairing makes sense on paper. Making it work in practice runs through a custodian — and through rules that don’t forgive improvisation.
Read →Accreditation, explained
The accredited-investor rules decide who may buy most private offerings. Understanding why they exist — and how verification actually works — removes the mystery and most of the friction.
Read →The tax paper trail of a private-market investor
Private investments generate documents on their own calendar — some arrive without asking, some exist only if you created them in a 30-day window. Know the cast before filing season.
Read →The case for structured secondaries
Private-market liquidity exists either way. The only question is whether it happens in an organized market with rules — or in an improvised one without them.
Read →Understanding 409A valuations
Every private company with a U.S. option plan has one. Almost nobody who holds the options knows what it says — or what it doesn’t.
Read →Preference stacks and waterfalls
When a private company sells, the money doesn’t divide by ownership percentage. It flows down a waterfall — and where you stand in it decides what you get.
Read →Down rounds and what they reprice
A round below the last round’s price doesn’t just cut the headline number. It triggers machinery — and the machinery is aimed at the common stock.
Read →The liquidity premium: what investors are paid to wait
Illiquidity is not a defect of private markets — it is the product. This paper examines what the liquidity premium is, where it shows up, and how investors collect it (or fail to).
Read →An operator’s guide to company-sponsored liquidity
For founders and CFOs: how to design a tender program that rewards tenure, protects the cap table, and doesn’t consume a quarter of your leadership’s attention.
Read →Private market basics
Public markets have tickers, exchanges, and a closing bell. Private markets have contracts, counterparties, and patience. Start with how the two actually differ.
Read →How a secondary transaction works
Between “I want to sell” and money in the bank sit six steps most sellers have never seen. Here is the lifecycle of a private secondary, start to finish.
Read →Tender offers, explained
The most orderly way to sell private shares is the one the company organizes itself. Here is how a tender offer works from the shareholder’s side of the table.
Read →What “indicative price” actually means
Private-market prices come with an adjective for a reason. Knowing what “indicative” does — and doesn’t — promise is the difference between information and illusion.
Read →Selling private shares: costs, taxes, and what to expect
The sale price is the headline. The net — after fees, exercise costs, and taxes — is what lands in your account. Walk through the arithmetic before you commit.
Read →What are alternative investments?
“Alternatives” is a definition by exclusion — everything that isn’t a public stock, bond, or cash. That grab-bag hides very different assets with one thing in common: the rules are different.
Read →Buying private equity is the easy part
Access to private markets has never been wider. The question almost nobody asks at the moment of purchase is the one that matters most: how, exactly, do I get out?
Read →A valuation is not a sale price
The number in the headline, the number in your option grant, and the number a buyer will actually pay are three different numbers. Confusing them is the most expensive mistake in private markets.
Read →Trust is not due diligence
Most private-market fraud doesn’t defeat analysis — it defeats the impulse to do any. The stronger the social proof, the more the verification matters.
Read →Lockups, gates, and side pockets
Hedge funds and semiliquid vehicles are liquid — until enough people want out at once. Three mechanisms decide whether your redemption request becomes cash.
Read →The quiet cost of layered fees
A fund of funds charges fees on top of the fees of the funds it holds. The arithmetic is simple; the drag it creates over a decade is anything but small.
Read →Selling a minority stake is not selling a fraction of the whole
Forty-nine percent of a business is not worth forty-nine percent of the business’s value. Two discounts — for control and for marketability — explain why.
Read →Educational only. InvestNow insights are general information, not investment, legal, or tax advice, and not an offer or solicitation of any security.