Liquidity can be a big issue in college. Your parents gave you money for food, but it’s all in the form of “meals” at the dining hall. As far as I know, there’s no market for converting these meals into cash, so you’re stuck on campus with the same slop that you’ve been eating daily for past 7 weeks. In the real world, liquidity can be a much bigger issue. There are plenty of people who are millionaires on paper but can’t pay their bills because all of the assets they hold are illiquid or hard to sell quickly. SecondMarket is a New York City and Palo Alto, CA based company that provides the largest secondary market for illiquid assets. In other words they help buyers find sellers and sellers find buyers for a variety of financial products. It’s not like eBay where you can turn Pez dispensers into cash—it’s for serious financial instruments that just don’t have thriving markets like publicly traded stocks do. SecondMarket is yet another Inc. 500 company—they came in at #270 with 1,156% three-year growth to $35 million in annual revenue.

First Job, SecondMarket

If you’re still not quite sure what liquidity means, take a look at the Wikipedia entry on market liquidity. It should clear things up. SecondMarket allows for the trading of many different types of assets including asset-backed securities, auction-rate securities, bankruptcy claims, collateralized debt obligations, limited partnership interests, private company stock, residential and commercial mortgage-backed securities, restricted securities and block trades in public companies, and whole loans. A lot of those words are probably unfamiliar, so if you want an intro that goes beyond Wikipedia, I strongly recommend reading The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine by Michael Lewis. I’m just about halfway through it (on the new Kindle that I got for my birthday!), and the book has really opened my eyes to what happens in many of those markets and how it led to the recent financial crisis. If you find this kind of stuff fascinating, then a job at SecondMarket might be perfect for you. They have a number of opportunities that seem well suited for new grads including Accounting Associate, Front Desk/Office Administrator, Java Front End Engineer, and Data Architect/Database Developer. I also did a little poking around LinkedIn, and it looks like there are also opportunities like Business Analyst and Marketing Designer; however, they don’t seem to be hiring for them right now. If you don’t see something that fits you, I’d definitely reach out to the folks at SecondMarket and see if there are any other opportunities.

Links to Help You Begin Your Research

• SecondMarket.com
• Jobs at SecondMarket
• About SecondMarket
• Management at SecondMarket
• SecondMarket News

Have you ever traded something on a secondary market?

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