Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: In Research, Private’s the New Public

Research

The big differences between private companies and public companies are:

1. Public companies disclose quarterly financial results and business information; private companies don’t.
2. Anyone can buy shares in public companies on the stock exchange; private companies’ shares don’t generally trade.

Those two things traditionally go together: Public companies can sell stock to anyone because they disclose information to everyone. But that is not an inevitable fact of nature; it is just a somewhat complicated consequence of US securities laws. And I get the sense that it is changing. Specifically, we seem to be getting closer to a world where anyone (or ...