I don't think this is worthy of being a story anymore. Remember that as public companies, GOOG, MSFT, FB, etc are all marked up and down many, many, many times

I don't think this is worthy of being a story anymore. Remember that as public companies, GOOG, MSFT, FB, etc are all marked up and down many, many, many times a day. Private companies can't be marked by a market so they get evaluated much less often, usually once a month to once a quarter depending on what type of firm owns them. As someone who has gone through how to evaluate holding equity in a private company, I can say its really an exercise in two things: 1) what will your auditor allow, this usually has lots of wiggle room and they are just looking to see if you can justify your valuation. 2) What you can sell if for. This usually is the more stringent requirement. Most of the time it really doesn't matter as you don't/can't liquidate your holding in 30 days. But it can become an issue if you have a large redemption. See a Matt Levine writeup on this where CPP sued a famous hedge fund for writing down some non liquid debt during the period where CPP wanted to redeem and then marking it back up in the months after they redeemed. http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-28/bond-prices-and-banker-mistakes http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-09-28/bond-prices...