Liquidity Premium
Categories: Trading, Company Valuation
You pay more for being able to sell something...sooner. That's the liquidity premium.
It used to apply wholly to publicly traded stocks. That is, private companies traded at a discount when investors wanted to invest because they couldn't sell, at least not until the company had gone public and they'd then waited 6 months and change, or something like that.
There was a discount to the pricing of private companies. But then the world changed, with so many investors interested in funding private companies that they no longer roundly trade at a discount with liquid public companies.
Regardless, you can imagine that it's a lot more attractive to invest in something when you know you can click a button and turn that investment into cash quickly, rather than have to wait months or years or decades before having the privilege.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is liquidity preference?27 Views
finance a la shmoop. what is liquidity preference?
yeah well liquidity is a good thing you want it. being liquid means that you have
cash which gives you options to you know buy stuff. and yeah even the Amazon River [money leaves a wallet in the grocery store]
shops at Amazon. all right so if your flavor of
investment has a liquidity preference over someone else's then your investment
all else being equal is preferable. see the liquidity preference . specifically if
you have liquidity preference and usually this is found in the form of
early stage of venture capital investor term sheets for investing in companies
in the form of convertible preferred stock- like it converts into common at
the IPO or something like that- then you get paid before everyone else
gets paid -at least in this form of stock- if the company gets sold.
all right well technically that is, but the company is sold and your convertible
preferred hasn't converted into common shares yet this company didn't go public. [convertible stock made into common stock]
but so like let's think about the example where if the company raised
twelve million bucks in preferred stock, which all had a liquidity preference
over and above common ,and then the whole company was sold for just fifteen
million dollars. well then those with liquidity preference would get liquid
first .ie they get their twelve million bucks. then the remaining three million
would be sprinkled around everyone else who was do the dough. plus any dividends
or accrued assets that have come our way otherwise. and yes technically debt
holders get paid ahead of the various series preferred investors who then get [list of who gets paid first]
paid ahead of the common shareholder but that's a different video. all right so
when it comes down to it you want to have liquidity preference. clearly I
prefer to be liquid myself. [man floats in lake in an inner tube]