The secondary market for shares of venture-backed private companies will remain largely under served for years to come. More information transparency is needed for it to live up to its potential.

Securities regulators took enforcement action against an online trading platform and two private funds offering Facebook shares on Wednesday, the first action in a year-long probe into the lightly regulated world of private company-share trading.

(Reuters) – Groupon Inc’s IPO may be the biggest test yet for the nascent private stock exchanges that allow investors to trade the shares of hot start-ups like Facebook Inc before they go public. The daily deals website is the first major company set to price its initial public offering at a valuation far below [...]

Two year ago, Sharespost founder Greg Brogger began publicly sharing plans to build a private placement marketplace to directly connect startups with investors. The fruit of that effort began to pay off today, when Sharepost, which since June 2009 has been helping qualified buyers and sellers trade shares in fast-growing, not-yet-public startups like Facebook, closed [...]

TrueCar broke the ice. Many LPs hope the hole gets larger. TrueCar, a startup that lets consumers check the prices of car sales, said Wednesday it raised $200 million in debt and equity financing, with part of its equity investment marketed on the secondary site SharesPost. SharesPost says it is the first time a company [...]

TrueCar, a company that provides car-sales prices to consumers, has raised over $200 million in debt and equity financing to use for acquisitions and growth, the company said. The transaction underscores continuing investor enthusiasm for companies that allow consumers to find good buys using the Internet. Daily-deals site Groupon has 115 million subscribers, although it [...]

U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission officials in March met with secondary market executives to warn them of impending regulatory changes, peHUB has learned. The regulators told the executives that they want more stringent checks of individuals’ accreditation and improved diligence regarding the financials of companies being auctioned to investors, according to multiple sources familiar with [...]

The secondary markets for private company stock may seem like the Wild West, with unstructured valuations and less than ideal information disclosure. Yet several securities laws apply to transactions now taking place, and the onus falls on companies to follow rules meant to level the playing field, including making some confidential information about their businesses [...]

A Twitter post, immediately following the back-to-back SharesPost and SecondMarket West Coast events, served as an echoing reverberation of the growing clout of private stock auctions as an industry. Said JenniferJones, “all of [Fred Wilson’s] (union square ventures) fund profits currently are through secondary sales says Jamie Montgomery.” Wilson, when contacted by peHUB, called the [...]

Operators of private stock exchanges want accredited investors to think they can buy into future IPOs of Twitter and LinkedIn early and freely, but that is no longer the case. Private companies coveted by institutional investors and individuals alike are increasingly putting strict limitations on who can buy their shares, according to sources who spoke [...]