I'm confused...
Which is better...
"Flawless balance sheet with outstanding track record... 76.7 % below estimate of fair value" 5.35% Yield
Or
"Outstanding track record with excellent balance sheet... 37.7 below estimate of fair value" 5.55% Yield
Mostly what I noted is the re-cycled name... Simply Wall Street... takes me back... 25 years ago or so ? Maybe late 1994 to late 1996. The name was my idea as a more user friendly improvement over the others being used: Wall Street Direct and Virtual Wall Street. I was a percentage owner in a start-up trying to use the internet to revolutionize the markets... to dis-intermediate stock trading by enabling direct internet trading... but doing it "in house" under the legitimacy of an established brokerage... which we bought and re-populated... and began operating and growing as a brokerage first. Not too much different in focus, purpose or function than trading cypto inside PayPal today... except for doing it 25 years earlier, in shares... including in Direct Public Offerings.
Spring Street Brewing came along and threw a wrench in the works... by just doing it... rather than cultivating it the way we were... They got a pass as a one off for bringing it to the SEC's attention... and then the SEC slammed the door shut hard. So, our own planned portal for direct public offerings got shut down before it could hope to get open and "just do it" right.
The Virtual Wall Street Reference Library has a table of DPOs compiled by the SCOR Report that was published in Inc. Magazine in December 1996. See <http://www.virtualwallstreet.com/library/table.shtml>.
Wall Street exists... not to facilitate capital aggregation and competition... but to prevent it.
The SEC's / Wall Street bank's knee jerk response to prevent themselves being subject to what computers were doing to every other business... had lasting consequences in the U.S. economy, preventing capital formation for a generation of startups... as that was made harder, and more expensive with an increase in tolls, rather than easier... with low cost access to a freeway... The damage still not undone, but mitigated somewhat, only by the subsequent emergence of "crowd sourcing"... as desperation drove people to donate rather than invest to enable innovation in spite of its suppression.
As the SEC pried the wheels off, Wall Street Direct / Virtual Wall Street / Simply Wall Street as the portal, imploded... The brokers threw the shareholders out in a staged BK and kept the value in substance for themselves, sold the brokerage on, and took the web interface private as "an information and news portal" using the equipment I had helped pay to acquire... which then lived on for a bit using Wall Street.com I think... I don't know if this article about Spring Street is based in that or not... Name conflicts common back then. Seems the residual survived and was still out there using some of the original names and still kicking in 2005... A search shows it was not dead yet in 2007, but then working as a PR outlet, as a subsidiary owned by a "how to" book publisher... Financial Media Group, Inc., that was probably who published the collected wisdom of the Reference Library as... The Virtual Wall Street Reference Library...
There it is... still going... bought out in 2018 by Discovery Data...
Damn thing has more inertia than I do... |
