One of the hottest tech investments in the world right now isn’t even a company that trades on public exchanges. To buy stock in Facebook, you’ve got to get your hands on private shares, and that means stepping outside the bounds of your normal brokerage account and turning to a specialty dealer like SecondMarket or a custom LLC created explicitly to invest in a specific private company.
BusinessWeek ran a story late last week detailing a newly created LLC called Zoom Ventures that exists solely as an investment vehicle for shares in Facebook. The LLC was started by EB Exchange, which is buying as much as $15 million in Facebook shares. Then, they’re selling units in the LLC at $10,000 each. The catch? The minimum investment is $100,000, and the LLC can have no more than 99 investors.
Also, you’ve got to get approved and be an accredited investor (i.e. a wealthy gent or gentlewoman) to join in. For their troubles, EB Exchange will extract a 5 percent fee when you join the LLC, and they’ll get “another 5 percent when Facebook shares are distributed after an initial public offering or acquisition.”
The article speculates that Facebook will go public sometime in 2012. Wish we could all be there!
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Tags: Facebook, Facebook IPO, SecondMarket












