Stock market listings are making founders, venture capitalists and large institutional investors an unexpected fortune. Now, retail traders look to get in on the action by using new digital investment platforms.
David Middleton, an M&A advisor based in Warrington, England, acquired shares of companies that listed recently, like Palantir, Snowflake and Coinbase, on the stock trading app Freetrade.
“For me it was just a case of: I just like the sound of the business,” Middleton he said. .
Middleton, a member of London-based financial education website Finimize, says it’s been a “bumpy road” when it comes to his investments. However, he is in it for the long term and made a gain on his investments.
“I’m not someone that goes into massive amounts of financial details — there are so many other things that affect share prices,” he added. “I don’t really care what happens in the short term. It could go up or it could go down. I sort of just want to be there for the ride.”
New platforms
Several platforms have surfaced over the years that let amateur investors own a small slice of companies in both the public and private markets. In venture capital, equity crowdfunding services like Crowdcube and Seedrs have long let start-ups to raise funds from users, the idea being that this boosts the relationship between customers and brands.
Crowdcube will launch a secondary market called Cubex, which allows existing shareholders offload some of their stakes in privately-held businesses to retail investors. The platform gets data from Crunchbase, a site that shows insights on start-ups, to provide users with information about the companies it lists.
“What we’ve done well over the past 10 years is to enable ordinary people be able to invest in exciting companies,” Darren Westlake, Crowdcube’s CEO and co-founder, said. “Our marketplace will list thousands of European companies, the idea being retail investors can come into the platform, use powerful search and discovery tools on the platform and customization to be able to find companies that are of interest to them.”
