Among the things I learned this week:
* Garden & Gun average subscriber household income is $332k. (Courtesy: WSJ)
* Fifty-eight percent of private market activity (as measured on Nasdaq Private Market) in 2015 was private company stock buybacks. That number was 44 percent in 2014. (Courtesy: WSJ)
* The history of debt and late evolution of money. (Courtesy: David Graeber’s Debt)
Among the things I learned this week:
* Mansudae Art Studio is North Korea’s art department, and its artwork is available for sale via an Italy-based company. (Courtesy: NYT)
* Evacuation Day (Courtesy: NYT)
* CubeSat movement technologies. (Courtesy: Economist)
* Northwestern-style xiao long baos have a thicker skin, because of the region’s more common use of flour. (Courtesy: NYT)
* Tobacco was legal tender in Virginia. (Courtesy: David Graeber’s Debt)
In my latest Capitalist Times article, Private Capital, Unicorns, and IPOs, I review trends in the private and IPO markets.
From the article:
Some analysts argue that 2016 will be a blowout year for initial public offerings (IPO) in the tech sector, in part because activity languished in 2015. According to their logic, this lack of deal flow must have created a backlog of companies that are primed to go public.
At the same time, growing economic uncertainty and our outlook for a bear-market correction this year suggest that the bumper crop of tech IPOs could be deferred. Against this backdrop, analyzing the IPO environment may strike you as a waste of time; however, the evolving role of private capital in the tech space has important implications for the timing and characteristics of future public offerings.