Thursday 10 September 2026 1:14 am
| Updated:
Wednesday 09 September 2026 6:28 pm
Pisces has been tried before...on Wall Street
The faint pop of a champagne bottle was heard in the Square Mile a few days ago, marking the first anniversary of the LSE getting a licence for Pisces – the private securities venue providing liquidity to fast-growing firms. As celebrations go, it was an intimate affair.Over the past year, just three businesses have signed up to the LSE’s Pisces – AI firm Wayve, fintech Moneybox and an abstruse ownership structure that sits above Oxford Science Enterprises. Between them, they have pulled off a mammoth four share auctions.Why have things been so quiet? Uncertainty triggered by the Iran war hasn’t helped, for one thing, and there is a similar sluggishness in the IPO world. For another, member firms have leaned towards a liberal interpretation of ‘intermittent’ – the ‘i’ in Pisces – which stipulates they don’t have to hold auctions with any great frequency. The Oxford Sciences auction takes place just once a quarter, while the Wayve and Moneybox auctions were a Hotel California-esque ‘one-off’: if you bought in, you may never leave. But maybe it was naive to expect a flurry of activity. We’re coming up to another great financial anniversary: the 20th of GSTrUE (you’re forgiven if you don’t recognise it). GSTrUE, which if nothing else deserves a prize for the acronym’s awfulness, stood for Goldman Sachs Tradable Unregistered Equity platform and was the eponymous bank’s attempt at a similar offering: provide liquidity events for firms that don’t want to IPO.It opened its doors to customers in early 2007 and landed big early wins: two of the sexiest private investment firms on Wall Street, Oaktree and Apollo, who between them raised over $1bn (you can’t raise anything on Pisces). That lifted hopes that GSTrUE could become a major force in the market. But it wasn’t to be.“There was one problem: No one showed up to trade on the exchange,” The New York Times wrote in 2012.
