Upstairs Trade
Categories: Trading
See: Upstairs Market.
This one happened behind closed doors. Nobody "public" knows about it. When an upstairs trade happens, it happens off a given exchange. It isn't recorded. It may or may not be shady or sketchy. But both parties acceded to the demands of privacy, and...shhhhh.
Think about the first few million shares of Facebook that Zuck wanted to dump so he could buy jets and yachts and islands and stuff. If word got out that he was suddenly dumping FB, odds are good that a thousand other institutions would join him in dumping the shares, and FB would print down some huge percentage. So, in quietly selling to a private party, or even an institutional investor like a hedge or mutual fund, Zuck will have avoided the white hot spotlight of inspection on that sale, done upstairs instead of downstairs, where everyone knows about it. And he will have earned himself a "like."
