Three mechanics to stop reading as lessons

• Cohen’s signalling purchase. It only works because a filing becomes public and a market reprices. A private company has no tape to signal to; buying your own equity is a liquidity event for whoever sells to you and nothing else. The transferable part is the diagnosis, not the trade: Cohen is describing concentration risk with no exit, which is the default condition of every private founder including you. His answer — add more — is available to him because he has public currency and a nine-figure buffer. The private version of “no exit hatch” is solved with diversification outside the company, not with more inside it.
• Slim’s scaled exit. Selling 9.7m shares over seven sessions while the realised price rises requires a liquid market with depth. The private analogue — selling a business in tranches — exists but is a different instrument entirely (vendor takeback, earnout, staged share sale over years), with the buyer’s solvency as the live risk instead of market depth. Do not reason from one to the other.
• Pledging shares for personal borrowing. Absent from this week’s tape but a recurring mechanic worth naming as non-transferable: lenders advance against listed collateral they can seize and sell. Private shares in a small Ontario software company are not that collateral, and a lender who takes them will want your personal guarantee as well, which reunites exactly the risks a holdco exists to separate.