Today’s IPOs: Fuhget About ‘Em: Here’s A REALLY Hot IPO in the Pipeline

Posted on April 16, 2015 by admin

BrokerDealer.com IPO update looks past today’s hot Initial Public Offerings from crafty company Etsy, (NASDAQ: ETSY), the $300mil+ captured by Virtu Financial, the fast trading electronic market maker (NASDAQ:VIRT) and even the big boost in today’s first day of trading for Party City Holdings (NYSE:PRTY)…

Instead, and thanks to Bloomberg’s Kristen Schweizer uncovering the story, we’d argue that all eyes should really be on a truly Hot IPO still in the pipeline, and portending to bare all to investors via a planned listing on the London Stock Exchange. Here’s the unadulterated coverage from Bloomberg’s 15 April story:

AshleyMadison.com, a dating website for cheating spouses, wants to hook up with investors by pursuing an initial public offering in London this year.

The site’s parent company, which failed with a previous IPO attempt in Canada, said on Wednesday it is looking to raise as much as $200 million to exploit booming demand for its services.

AshleyMadison CEO Chris Kraemer

AshleyMadison had sales of $115 million last year, an almost fourfold increase on 2009, Christoph Kraemer, its head of international relations said in an interview. It makes money by charging men for credits, which they then use for introductions to women.

Avid Life Media Inc., the Toronto-based holding company that runs AshleyMadison.com along with peers Cougarlife.com and EstablishedMen.com, wants the new funds for marketing and international expansion.

AshleyMadison has 36 million members in 46 countries, Kraemer said, and claims to be the world’s second-largest paid-for Internet dating website, behind Match.com.

While the U.S. accounts for about 50 percent of its business, Kraemer said “Europe is the only region where we have a real chance of doing an IPO” because of its more liberal attitude toward adultery.

“We’re no longer a niche, but it’s been difficult in North America to find the support to go public,” he added.

The company has also set a target that 50-60 percent of its sales will come from Asia by 2020, including Japan, Taiwan and South Korea.

Avid Life Media, whose investors are wealthy North Americans who prefer to remain anonymous, registered 45 percent sales growth last year and a profit margin between 20 percent and 25 percent, according to Kraemer, who said the company estimates its value at $1 billion.

It attempted a share sale in Toronto in 2010 but investor appetite wasn’t there, he said. “Right now our focus is to do our homework on London. It’s our priority and our second attempt at IPOing has to go well. We don’t want to repeat what happened the first time around.”

The entire story is bared via this direct link to Bloomberg LP uncoverag

This BrokerDealer is Bullish on CrowdFunding Via OneVest

Posted on April 16, 2015 by admin

BrokerDealer.com blog update profiles broker-dealer North Capital Private Securities bent towards the surge in Crowdfunding and their recently-announced strategy to promote the OneVest platform. This story is courtesy of InvestmentNews.com with reporting by Alessandra Malito

Broker-dealer North Capital Private Securities has agreed to add the crowdfunding site OneVest to its platform that syndicates private offerings for investors. The platform, called 99Funding, has a minimum investment of $1,000 to $5,000, depending on the offering, but no fees for advisers or investors.

North Capital Private Securities vets each investment opportunity by reviewing documents, analyzing investment propositions against the market, doing background checks on principals and performing other due diligence.

More advisers are getting involved in crowdfunding, according to Jim Dowd, managing director of North Capital Private Securities.

“Just now it’s sort of getting into the more established financial services phase where financial advisers and independent broker-dealers are starting to look at these opportunities on behalf of their clients,” he said. “It’s driven by clients more than anything. Clients are insisting on these opportunities instead of brokers or advisers bringing the opportunities to them.”

REGULATORS TAKE ACTION

Crowdfunding grabbed regulators’ attention a couple years ago when Ohio officials sought to shut down a crowdfunding site for allegedly misleading investors about the earnings potential of investment opportunities.

Since then, state regulators, like in Massachusetts, have wanted investors to know that “some crowdfunding platforms might exaggerate potential returns and not present fair and balanced risk and opportunity,” according to Mr. Dowd.

“That’s why we embrace the idea of regulation from the beginning,” he said.

Marianne Hudson, executive director at Angel Capital Association, a network of accredited angel investors, said that if done right, crowdfunding can be a way to diversify a portfolio.

“It’s just a matter of finding out if it fits in your interest and understanding and own investment preferences,” she said. “A lot of them offer opportunities to make smaller investments . . . which then totally adds for diversity.”

Having the ability to make small investments may make the process more attractive to advisers and their clients who can then allocate a portion of their portfolio to this type of investment.

Ms. Hudson’s advice to financial advisers is to do their own due diligence.

“They need to get each individual platform to make sure they’re comfortable,” she said.

BrokerDealers That Do Dare To Be Different: Diversity & Inclusion

Posted on April 15, 2015April 15, 2015 by admin

BrokerDealer.com blog update takes a different tact in this post and sends a salute to 6-pack leader Citigroup, along with interest-aligned boutique firms Mischler Financial Group and Williams Capital for a focus on something other than its trading PnL. The topic? Diversity & Inclusion. Sounds corny, sounds like a social program that merely meets the ‘check the box’ approach by those who know they have to seem good to get paid. But then again, because this platform connects with broker-dealers across the US, as well as throughout the rest of the free world in which capitalism reigns, the team at BrokerDealer.com knows that the initiative highlighted here is nothing short of genuine.

Mischler Financial Group, the financial industry’s oldest minority firm owned and operated by Service-Disabled Veterans [and the securities industry’s only federally-certified SDVBE] along with Williams Capital, the industry’s leading African-American owned brokerdealer have taken great pride in playing a supporting role in the below Citigroup-produced video profiling the firm’s unqualified dedication to diversity and inclusion that Citi, one of the world’s largest banks and a Top 25 Fortune corporations maintains across their entire ecosystem.

A founder of Veterans On Wall Street (VOWS) along with Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs, as well as being “a lead book-runner” in multiple year-round initiatives to advance the support of many great causes, Citi is a true thought leader on the topic of D&I within the context of not only the financial services sector, but also within the framework of global corporation best practices.

The video below, which formally aired April 10 (also available on the Citi blog) is uniquely impactful thanks to the influential roles played by Citi leaders Kate Oddo, Director of Debt Capital Markets, Patrice Altongy Managing Director Fixed Income Capital Markets, Citigroup Global Markets Inc. and Karen Papazian, Director, Dealer Lending Operations, Toyota Financial Services. The presentation speaks volumes as to Citi’s D&I-driven relationship with Toyota Motors Inc. (NYSE:TM) wholly-owned subsidiary, Toyota Motor Credit Corporation (TMCC), one of the global capital markets’ most focused Issuers of securities, and indisputably, one of the corporate world’s most respected D&I practitioners.

The clip below, entitled “Wall Street Leaders Can Dare to be Different” profiles just one of many approaches on the part of Citi to further the importance of D&I initiatives, and represents a welcome and increasingly growing trend taking place across Wall Street.

Sharing the same philosophy that Citi is dedicated to, the leadership and team at Mischler Financial Group is unabashedly dedicated to the thesis that Diversity & Inclusion programs strike at the heart of corporate best practices. We believe that those who embrace the tenants of D&I are likely to be better for it in the eyes of their stakeholders , which necessarily include respective employees, the consumers and communities they serve, and the investors/shareholders who look to corporate leaders to always deliver better performance.

Etsy Vendors Will Be Able To Invest In Themselves

Posted on April 14, 2015April 15, 2015 by admin

Brokerdealer.com’s blog update continues coverage of the Etsy IPO. On Thursday, Etsy’s IPO will finally be launched, they have unique plan to target small investors and focus on fewer big investors as part of its plan for their IPO and now it has been release that Etsy’s vendors will be able to invest in themselves. Etsy has set aside 5% of shares for Etsy vendors to purchase through a Morgan Stanley program. The vendors can buy between $100-$2,500 worth of Etsy stocks, how much vendors get will ultimately depend on the pricing and demand of Etsy’s IPO. This brokerdealer.com blog update is courtesy of the Wall Street Journal’s article, “Etsy Vendors to Get a Piece of IPO“, with an excerpt below.

Jeni Sandberg usually deals in vintage and collectible items, not in hot new stocks. Still, the home-based art appraiser and consultant plans to take a stake in Etsy Inc. when shares in the online marketplace go public this week.

Ms. Sandberg, who lives in Raleigh, N.C., has been a vendor on Etsy for five years, earning income from her sales there and from work as an art consultant. A former specialist at auction house Christie’s, she manages her own investments and is “by no means a massive player in the financial market.”

When it comes to initial public offerings of stock, “you’re always told, ‘You can’t participate. You’re not part of a financial syndicate. Go away, little person,’” she said.

Etsy, whose IPO is expected to price Wednesday and begin trading Thursday, sought to remedy that lack of access for its vendors and other small investors with a program that gives them the opportunity to buy as much as $2,500 in Etsy stock just before its public float, which aims to raise as much as $267 million. Ms. Sandberg plans to claim her full allotment. “This, I want to do,” she said.

To read the full article from the Wall Street Journal, click here.

Tech IPO Looks To Out Fund Etsy

Posted on April 13, 2015 by admin

Last week brokerdealer.com‘s blog profiled the different practice the peer-to-peer e-commerce company, Etsy, planned to use for its own billion dollar IPO. Now a little known New York tech company, Virtu Financial, is planning to launch its own billion dollar IPO this week that will rival Etsy’s. This brokerdealer.com blog update is courtesy of Crain’s New York Business’s article, “The $1B-plus startup IPO coming this week that’s not Etsy“, below is an excerpt.

The long, cold winter has ended,and the thaw is extending to the IPO market. Etsy, Brooklyn’s sentimental favorite,is making headlines with a public offering this week that could raise as much as $267 million, giving it a valuation of nearly $1.8 billion.

But another New York tech company, one that you’ve probably never heard of, is also going public this week—and it plans to raise more money than Etsy. Virtu Financial, a high-speed trading firm, believes investors will fork over as much as $361 million for shares that would make it worth $2.6 billion.

Hard to warm to

Virtu, founded in 2008, is not the sort of company you easily warm up to. It put off a public offering last year when the Michael Lewis book Flash Boys shone a highly unflattering light on high-speed trading. (The Wall Street Journal points out that Virtu has since allied itself with a company that doesn’t hurt other investors with its trading technology and that it earned a favorable mention in the paperback edition of the book.)

Etsy, meanwhile, has made news with an IPO strategy that has been described variously as handcrafted and artisanal. It is spreading the wealth around among smaller investors by putting a cap of $2,500 on the amount of stock that retail in-vestors can buy.

To continue read this article from Crain’s New York Business, click here.