Obtaining Private Prospectuses
How can I get quarterly information about private companies? Ask the owner(s).  Unelss you have a relationship and they're interested in helping you, they will likely tell you no as there's no compelling reason for them to do so.  It's a huge benefit of not taking a company public.
I guess you are making quite a bit of assumptions without clarifying what you are trying to achieve. As a non-resident you cannot incorporate a sole proprietorship in Singapore. You have to be citizen. Alternatively you can register a company that has its own norms like minimum number of directors and some being Singapore national, etc. As you are paying dividend and not salary to yourself, the company will be required to pay taxes on gains. So all consulting money is gain as there is no expense. The balance when you transfer to Spain would potentially get taxed as income to you subject to DTAA "There are two kinds of engagements in an IPO. The traditional kind where the Banks assume the risks of unsold shares. Money coming out of their pockets to hold shares no one wants. That is the main risk. No one buying the stock that the bank is holding.  Secondly, there is a ""best efforts"" engagement. This means that bank will put forth its best effort to sell the shares, but will not be on the hook if any don't sell. This is used for small cap / risky companies.  Source: Author/investment banker" "A company whose stock is available for sale to the public is called a publicly-held or publicly-traded company.  A public company's stock is sold on a stock exchange, and anyone with money can buy shares through a stock broker. This contrasts with a privately-held company, in which the shares are not traded on a stock exchange. In order to invest in a private company, you would need to talk directly to the current owners of the company. Finding out if a company is public or private is fairly easy.  One way to check this is to look at the Wikipedia page for the company.  For example, if you take a look at the Apple page, on the right sidebar you'll see ""Type: Public"", followed by the stock exchange ticker symbol ""AAPL"".  Compare this to the page for Mars, Inc.; on that page, you'll see ""Type: Private"", and no stock ticker symbol listed. Another way to tell: If you can find a quote for a share price on a financial site (such as Google Finance or Yahoo Finance), you can buy the stock.  You won't find a stock price for Mars, Inc. anywhere, because the stock is not publicly traded." couple questions for clarification:  1. Investment firm is a pretty broad term. Do you mean Registered Investment Advisory firm or broker/dealer, or something else?  2. Are you asking if they can reveal who they generally custody assets with? if so yes, they are always willing to give this out and many firms use multiple custodians. If you are asking if they can reveal client information and where the assets are held, then no, absolutely not, the only reason they could legally give this out is if the feds inquired or if a court order was issued. "Shares sold to private investors are sold using private contracts and do not adhere to the same level of strict regulations as publicly traded shares. You may have different classes of shares in the company with different strings attached to them, depending on the deals made with the investors at the time. Since public cannot negotiate, the IPO prospectus is in fact the investment contract between the company and the public, and the requirements to what the company can put there are much stricter than private sales. Bob may not be able to sell his ""special"" stocks on the public exchange, as the IPO specifies which class of stock is being listed for trading, and Bob's is not the same class. He can sell it on the OTC market, which is less regulated, and then the buyer has to do his due diligence. Yes, OTC-sold stocks may have strings attached to them (for example a buy back option at a preset time and price)." I work for an investment group in Central Asia in private equity/project investment. We use SPV and collateralized convertible loans to enter a project, we issue the loan at our own commercial bank. For each industry, the exact mechanisms vary. In most outcomes, we end up in control of some very important part of the business, and even if we have minority shares on paper, no decision is made w/o our approval.  For example, we enter cosntruction projects via aquisiton of land and pledging the land as equity for an SPV, then renting it to the project operator.   Basically, when you enter a business, be in control of the decisions there, or have significant leverage on the operations. Have your own operating professionals to run it. Profit. Ok, that's totally different then.  The legislation that you were mentioning doesn't apply to prop shops that trade derivatives.   If you want to end up in the equities world, then a place that requires those licenses that will pay for it doesn't seem like a bad deal. You won't be able to know the trading activity in a timely, actionable method in most cases. The exception is if the investor (individual, fund, holding company, non-profit foundation, etc) is a large shareholder of a specific company and therefore required to file their intentions to buy or sell with the SEC. The threshold for this is usually if they own 5% or greater of the outstanding shares. You can, however, get a sense of the holdings for some of the entities you mention with some sleuthing. Publicly-Traded Holding Companies Since you mention Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway is an example of this. Publicly traded companies (that are traded on a US-based exchange) have to file numerous reports with the SEC. Of these, you should review their Annual Report and monitor all filings on the SEC's website. Here's the link to the Berkshire Hathaway profile. Private Foundations Harvard and Yale have private, non-profit foundations. The first place to look would be at the Form 990 filings each is required to file with the IRS. Two sources for these filings are GuideStar.org and the FoundationCenter.org. Keep in mind that if the private foundation is a large enough shareholder in a specific company, they, too, will be required to file their intentions to buy or sell shares in that company. Private Individuals Unless the individual publicly releases their current holdings, the only insight you may get is what they say publicly or have to disclose — again, if they are a major shareholder. Yes you can get them from your broker.  Two main advantages I can see are: You cannot trade in pre-IPO shares of companies like Facebook without being an accredited investor. If a website or company doesn't mention that requirement, they are a scam. A legitimate market for private shares is SecondMarket. All request and new cases are productively evaluated and screened online at Contact Us. Introductory consultations, LLC formations, and records for routine land and business exchanges are taken care of only online at prudent level expenses. A scope of Delaware llc in-office benefits after the underlying conference is offered yet at expenses higher than those cited for online things. We will keep you refreshed all through the procedure. We give steady correspondence and continuous notices as we process your incorporation. it sounds like you don't have experience in this, and neither does your *investor*; which is a recipe for disaster (pun intended).  Your first order of business is to check whether your investor is an *Accredited Investor* (google to see what it means), if s/he's not, **walk away**.  If s/he's an accredited investor, find a lawyer who can help you navigate this process, however these are the issues:  * lawyers are expensive, and lawyers who have experience in these type of transactions are even more expensive * you actually need 2 lawyers, one for you and one for the investor * if neither of you have experience, there will be a lot more billable hours from the lawyers.....  In principle this can go 3 ways:  1. The investors give you a loan, you pay them interests on a periodic basis, and then also principal.  Items to be negotiated: interest rates, repayment schedule, collateral, personal guarantees. Highly unlikely this is what the investors wants.  2. The Investors get equity. items to be negotiated: your compensation, % of ownership, how profits are divided, how profits are paid; who gets to decide what.  3. A combination of 1 and 2 above, a *Convertible Note*.  There's a lot more, too much for a Reddit post.  There's not an easy ELI5. Stuff I wish I had known, based on having done the following: Obtained employment at a startup that grants Incentive Stock Options (ISOs);  Early-exercised a portion of my options when fair market value was very close to my strike price to minimize AMT; made a section 83b) election and paid my AMT up front for that tax year. All this (the exercise and the AMT) was done out of pocket. I've never see EquityZen or Equidate mention anything about loans for your exercise. My understanding is they help you sell your shares once you actually own them. Stayed at said startup long enough to have my exercised portion of these ISOs vest and count as long term capital gains;  Tried to sell them on both EquityZen and Equidate with no success, due to not meeting their transaction minimums.  Initial contact with EquityZen was very friendly and helpful, and I even got a notice about a potential sale, but then they hired an intern to answer emails and I remember his responses being particularly dismissive, as if I was wasting their time by trying to sell such a small amount of stock. So that didn't go anywhere. Equidate was a little more friendly and was open to the option of pooling shares with other employees to make a sale in order to meet their minimum, but that never happened either.  My advice, if you're thinking about exercising and you're worried about liquidity on the secondary markets, would be to find out what the minimums would be for your specific company on these platforms before you plunk any cash down. Eventually brought my request for liquidity back to the company who helped connect me with an interested external buyer, and we completed the transaction that way. As for employer approval - there's really no reason or basis that your company wouldn't allow it (if you paid to exercise then the shares are yours to sell, though the company may have a right of first refusal). It's not really in the company's best interest to have their shares be illiquid on the secondary markets, since that sends a bad signal to potential investors and future employees. What I think was being asked (and so this is how I interpreted it) is not the transition from public to private, but a corporation itself buying all its shares back, and as a result having no shareholders.  In this case we could envision that all outstanding shares would be become treasury stock.  My argument was that this would never happen in a practical setting.  Obviously, if you interpret the question differently, for instance to be about all the shares of firm being purchased by someone else (as in a private equity buyout), you get very different answers about practicality.  So I'm not disagreeing with you at all, I just read the question differently. Usually your best bet for this sort of thing is to look for referrals from people you trust. If you have a lawyer or other trusted advisor, ask them.