Intermediate 60 min total7 lessons

Pre-IPO & IPO Investing

The only investing subject where almost everything written for retail investors is unverifiable. This course fixes that: it teaches you to read a private company's valuation out of the fund filings that carry it, to check how wrong those valuations have historically been, to price the public routes into a private company in dollars, and to read a lock-up clause out of the prospectus before it expires. Every figure in these lessons is computed live from SEC filings and updates when the underlying data does.

Why this course is different. The figures in these lessons are not written into the pages. They are read at build time from the same four SEC-filing datasets that power our private-markets tools, so the median error you learn in Lesson 3 is the median error as of the last data build — not a number someone typed once.

Start Lesson 1
6,756 fund marks
Form N-PORT holdings from 99 registrants, covering 20 companies
6 graded listings
Every covered company that has since gone public, mark vs first traded price
47 lock-up clauses
Read out of 107 prospectuses, with 9 calls currently open
4 proxies, 9 funds
Priced routes into 17 of the 20 covered companies

What you'll be able to do

Know exactly which private-market routes are open to you and which are closed by law
Read a private company's per-share valuation out of an SEC Form N-PORT filing
Judge a private valuation by how far the funds carrying it disagree with each other
Quote the historical error between fund marks and first traded prices, with cases
Price the public routes into a private company in dollars per $10,000 invested
Tell a real closed-end-fund discount from a premium you should refuse to pay
Read a lock-up clause and estimate how many trading days the unlock needs to clear
Write a position-sizing and tax policy for IPOs before you are tempted by one
7 lessons
One idea per lesson, each ending in a quiz
~60 minutes total
Self-paced — nothing here expires
Every figure traceable
Each number links to the filing it came from
100% free
No account required to read any lesson

Course lessons

1
What Pre-IPO Investing Actually Is (And What You Cannot Buy)
Accredited-investor rules, secondary platforms, SPVs and interval funds — the five routes into a private company, which ones are legally open to you, and what each one charges for the privilege.
8 min
›
2
Where a Private Company's Valuation Actually Comes From
Mutual funds holding private stock must file what they think it is worth, share by share. Learn to read a Form N-PORT mark, and to judge a valuation by how far the funds carrying it disagree.
9 min
›
3
How Wrong Those Valuations Are — The Evidence
Graded against every covered company that has since listed: the median fund mark was materially below the first traded price, and the two worst cases were not errors at all but share-count changes. Why that distinction matters more than the error.
9 min
›
4
The Public Routes In: Proxies, Closed-End Funds & Discounts
Buying Amazon to own Anthropic gets you a specific number of dollars per $10,000 — and it is smaller than you think. How to size a proxy stake, and how to read a fund's premium or discount to NAV before you pay it.
9 min
›
5
How an IPO Actually Works, From S-1 to First Trade
The registration statement, the roadshow, how the offer price is set, who actually gets allocation, and why the first-day pop is a cost to the company and usually a trap for you.
8 min
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6
Lock-Up Expiry: Reading the Clause and Doing the Flow Math
Cliff, staged and earnings-linked lock-ups, where the share count comes from, and the one calculation that tells you whether an unlock is absorbable — shares released divided by average daily volume.
9 min
›
7
Writing Your Own Pre-IPO & IPO Policy
Position sizing for an asset you cannot value precisely, the tax treatment nobody mentions until April, a pre-trade checklist, and the four situations where the right answer is to buy nothing.
8 min
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Who this course is not for

If you are looking for a list of private companies to buy before they list, this is the wrong course — and the honest reason is in Lesson 1: for most readers, most of those routes are closed by law, and the ones that are open are priced accordingly.

What this course does give you is the ability to check a claim. When someone tells you a private company is worth a given amount per share, you will know which filing to open, how many independent funds stand behind the figure, and how far off the same kind of figure has been on the companies that have already listed. Start with Stock Investing for Beginners first if reading a balance sheet is still new.

Ready to start?

Lesson 1 takes 8 minutes and starts with the one question everything else depends on: what can you actually buy?

Begin: Lesson 1 →