The dot-com bubble was a stock market bubble that ballooned during the late-1990s and peaked on Friday, March 10, 2000. This period of market growth coincided with the widespread adoption of the World Wide Web and the Internet, resulting in a dispensation of available venture capital and the rapid growth of valuations in new dot-com startups. Between 1995 and its peak in March 2000, investments in the NASDAQ composite stock market index rose by 800%, only to fall 78% from its peak by October 2002, giving up all its gains during the bubble.
The Nasdaq Stock Market is an American stock exchange based in New York City. It is the most active stock trading venue in the U.S. by volume, and ranked second on the list of stock exchanges by market capitalization of shares traded, behind the New York Stock Exchange. The exchange platform is owned by Nasdaq, Inc., which also owns the Nasdaq Nordic stock market network and several U.S.-based stock and options exchanges. Although it trades stock of healthcare, financial, entertainment, retail, and food businesses, it focuses more on technology stocks. The exchange is made up of both American and foreign firms, with China and Israel being the largest foreign sources.
An initial public offering (IPO) or stock launch is a public offering in which shares of a company are sold to institutional investors and usually also to retail (individual) investors. An IPO is typically underwritten by one or more investment banks, who also arrange for the shares to be listed on one or more stock exchanges. Through this process, colloquially known as floating, or going public, a privately held company is transformed into a public company. Initial public offerings can be used to raise new equity capital for companies, to monetize the investments of private shareholders such as company founders or private equity investors, and to enable easy trading of existing holdings or future capital raising by becoming publicly traded.
The secondary market, also called the aftermarket and follow on public offering, is the financial market in which previously issued financial instruments such as stock, bonds, options, and futures are bought and sold. The initial sale of the security by the issuer to a purchaser, who pays proceeds to the issuer, is the primary market. All sales after the initial sale of the security are sales in the secondary market. Whereas the term primary market refers to the market for new issues of securities, and "[a] market is primary if the proceeds of sales go to the issuer of the securities sold," the secondary market in contrast is the market created by the later trading of such securities.
Nasdaq, Inc. is an American multinational financial services corporation that owns and operates three stock exchanges in the United States: the namesake Nasdaq stock exchange, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, and the Boston Stock Exchange, and seven European stock exchanges: Nasdaq Copenhagen, Nasdaq Helsinki, Nasdaq Iceland, Nasdaq Riga, Nasdaq Stockholm, Nasdaq Tallinn, and Nasdaq Vilnius. It is headquartered in New York City, and its president and chief executive officer is Adena Friedman.
Nasdaq Dubai is a Dubai-based stock exchange that lists regional and international shares in the Middle East. Through the exchange, regional issuers can access regional and international investment. International issuers can access investment from the region, through a primary or dual listing.
A special-purpose acquisition company, also known as a "blank check company", is a shell corporation listed on a stock exchange with the purpose of acquiring a private company, thus making the private company public without going through the initial public offering process, which often carries significant procedural and regulatory burdens. According to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), SPACs are created specifically to pool funds to finance a future merger or acquisition opportunity within a set timeframe; these opportunities usually have yet to be identified while raising funds.
Constellation Automotive Group is a used vehicle marketplace. It was founded in the United Kingdom in 1946, as Southern Counties Car Auctions, and was a publicly traded company, BCA Marketplace, when acquired and taken private by TDR Capital in November 2019. TDR rebranded it to the current name in October 2020.
Leaf Group, formerly Demand Media Inc., is an American content company that operates online brands, including eHow, livestrong.com, and marketplace brands Saatchi Art and Society6. The company provides social media platforms for large company websites and distributes content with social media tools to web outlets. It is commonly known for being a content farm. Demand Media was created in 2006 by a former private equity investor, Shawn Colo, and the former chairman of MySpace, Richard Rosenblatt.
Surplus Record is the leading independent business directory of surplus, new, and used machine tools, machinery, and industrial equipment in the United States. It was founded in 1924 by Thomas P. Scanlan.
Nasdaq Private Market (NPM) provides a secondary market trading venue for issuers, brokers, shareholders, and prospective investors of private company stock. Since inception, NPM has facilitated more than $40 billion in transactional volume and has worked with 400+ private companies and 100,000+ employees, stakeholders, and investors. NPM offers private company and investors different solutions including tender offers, auctions, block trades, and custom company marketplaces. In 2021, NPM spun-off of Nasdaq to become its own, independent company receiving strategic investments from Silicon Valley Bank, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and Allen and Co.
Copart, Inc. is a global provider of online vehicle auction and remarketing services to automotive resellers such as insurance, rental car, fleet and finance companies in 11 countries; the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Ireland, Brazil, Spain, UAE, Bahrain, Oman and Finland. Headquartered in Dallas, Texas, Copart has more than 200 physical locations around the world, where it houses more than 10,000 acres of vehicle inventory. Copart sells used, wholesale and repairable vehicles in weekly and bi-weekly online auctions to buyers ranging from consumers to automotive businesses around the world. Copart provides vehicle sellers with a range of services to process and sell repairable and clean title vehicles over the internet, using its patented virtual auction technology, named VB3, as well as others of its auction-related brands.
CoStar Group, Inc. is a Washington, DC-based provider of information, analytics, and marketing services to the commercial property industry in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Spain. Founded in 1987 by Andrew C. Florance, the company has grown to include the online database CoStar and many online marketplaces, including Apartments.com, Homes.com, LoopNet, Lands of America, and BizBuySell.
IndiaMART InterMESH Ltd is India's largest B2B online marketplace, connecting buyers and suppliers. It is headquartered in Noida and currently hosts 194 million registered buyers and 7.9 million sellers, listed on its marketplace. It has over 108 million products listed in over 98,000 product categories in across 56 industry groups.
Tradeweb Markets Inc. is an international financial technology company that builds and operates electronic over-the-counter (OTC) marketplaces for trading fixed income products, ETFs, and derivatives. Its customers include banks, asset managers, central banks, pension funds and insurance companies. Tradeweb's headquarters are in New York City.
Royalty Exchange is an American company that operates an online platform for buying and selling royalty assets of any type, mostly music, where royalty owners can sell their future payments to investors as alternative assets. The company hosts a centralized marketplace and online auction platform that connects a community of over 22,500+ investors with owners of royalty-based assets.
CarTrade.com is an Indian online auto classifieds platform serving as a marketplace for users interested in buying and selling new and used vehicles. Headquartered in Mumbai, the company also owns other vehicle trading platforms such as CarWale, BikeWale and CarTradeExchange, the omnichannel vehicle auction company Shriram Automall, the vehicle inspection company Adroit Auto, and the classifieds portal OLX India.
Shift Technologies, Inc. was an American company that sold used vehicles online and also maintained a consignment-based online marketplace for buying and selling used cars. Founded in 2014, Shift was based in San Francisco's Mission District. As of October 2022, the company offered its services in the San Francisco Bay Area, Greater Los Angeles, and Portland, OR. On October 6, 2023, Shift Technologies announced its intentions to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. As of that date, its final two locations in Oakland and Pomona, California, and its website is no longer in operation.
Metropress Limited, trading as Auction Technology Group, is a digital marketplace business listed on the London Stock Exchange. It also publishes Antiques Trade Gazette which is a London-based weekly publication and website serving the art and antiques community and was the original genesis of the business but is now a small proportion of the group’s revenues. The print publication has around 16,000 subscribers (2015). It is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
StockX is an online marketplace and clothing reseller, primarily of sneakers. Since November 2020, it has also opened up to electronic products such as game consoles, smartphones and computer hardware. The Detroit-based company was founded by Dan Gilbert, Josh Luber, Greg Schwartz, and Chris Kaufman in 2015–2016. StockX has more than 800 employees in Downtown Detroit. StockX currently has international offices in London, UK, in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, and has authentication facilities in Detroit's Corktown neighborhood, Moonachie, NJ, and Tempe, AZ. Scott Cutler and Schwartz serve as chief executive officer and chief operating officer, respectively, and Deena Bahri became the company's first chief marketing officer in 2019.
