Facebook Drives SecondMarket Broking $1 Billion Private Shares - 26 Apr 2011

Barry Silbert was born to trade.

By age 10, he was swapping baseball cards at collectors
conventions. At 15, he plowed his savings into shares of
Chromatics Color Sciences International Inc. -- a penny stock
that lost him $2,000. And as a 25-year-old banker for the
creditors of Enron Corp., Silbert traveled the globe after the
firm’s 2001 bankruptcy, flogging Enron assets, including fiber-
optic cable and Bolivian pipelines.

He’s been a registered broker since he was 17, Bloomberg
Markets magazine reports in its June issue.

Today, Silbert, 34, is the best-known player in a sizzling
market: the trading of shares of private, venture-backed social-
media companies such as Facebook Inc., LinkedIn Corp. and
Twitter Inc. As chief executive officer of New York-based
SecondMarket Holdings Inc., he is building the go-to forum for
trading these boldfaced shares, some of whose prices more than
doubled in the 12 months ended in mid-April.

Those rising stock valuations are turbocharging
SecondMarket -- and making Silbert rich. SecondMarket says

more...