Hey Jason – yeah, liquidity is (one of) the huge issue(s) right now. i.e. There simply aren’t enough people buying and selling, so it’s a pretty inefficient marketplace.
I think some of that may also depend on the companies.
There are other secondary marketplaces now coming online, though, and I expect StartEngine will have quite a few competitors in the next year. Then again, “competition” doesn’t mean a whole lot right now, since you can only buy and sell the company you want on the platform that has it, so it won’t be like a stock listed on the NYSE or NASDAQ where you can buy it from any brokerage. So I think it will depend more on the companies that are listed rather than the actual platform (such as StartEngine) itself.
Netcapital is partnering with Rialto to redo their secondary marketplace.
Republic announced that if they don’t find a suitable secondary partner by next year, they will launch their own.
KoreConX has also alluded to their secondary marketplace to allow security holders who use them as their Transfer Agent to be able to trade, potentially powered by their blockchain technology (not sure if they’d also partner with Rialto or what).
https://www.koreconx.com/videos/secondary-market-trading-for-rega/
Then of course there are the broker-dealers, like Rialto and others.
In short – it’s going to take some time. And the secondary private markets will never be AS liquid as the public markets for sure, so there will always be some inefficiency to buy or sell prior to having something that has a large trading volume.