Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Private Indices Are the New Indices

Private index

I just feel like, within living memory, there were “public companies,” in which you could invest, and “private companies,” in which you couldn’t. I mean, someone could: Many private companies took no outside investment, but some did, and so if you ran the right sort of pool of capital and had the right connections you could end up with a collection of investments in private companies. But there was not a thing called, like, the “private market.” You couldn’t pick from a menu of big private companies and just go buy their shares. “Private companies” was not a ...