More Good Stuff from Conference

I very much enjoyed the panel I moderated at last week’s Reverse Merger Conference which sought to answer the question, “Why consider a reverse merger in this environment?” The panel reiterated the value of going public in any market if a company sees benefits in doing so and can bear the costs. And in a self-filing or reverse merger, the markets down the road are more important than conditions today. We talked about the future of SPACs (they should return when markets improve but in a different form), China and other foreign markets (positive outlook), the shell market (shell prices have gone down and vehicles are more commoditized), including footnote 32/172 shells (it was felt that some regulators are  beginning to pay attention to these questionable vehicles), the relative benefit of different types of shells (Form 10s, despite the rather negative article in the Reverse Merger Report, more about this in another column, are more and more popular as clean alternatives to “legacy” shells), and whether self-filings or reverse mergers make the most sense (with recent regulatory changes self-filings become more attractive in some situations).

I felt we gave a good kick-off to the 2-day meeting in which I was glad that comments from our panel were repeated throughout the various panels to come. Looking solely at the traffic at our sponsor table, it appears there are many folks getting ready to move forward on a variety of projects. Attendance was certainly down from last year’s huge turnout at the conference in Los Angeles, but it was a hardy group. More comments to come, including a review of a discussion of social and other networking opportunities (such as this blog!) that took place on the second day.

Leave a comment