This is part of the Mark Cuban Article from the Wa

“The stock market has become a platform not for creating capital to help companies grow, but a platform for financial hackers, where most of the activity is just algorithmic and high-frequency trading,” Mark Cuban, a business magnate and owner of the Dallas Mavericks, said in an interview following the same event on Friday.

“In the ‘90s, you would raise $5 million or $10 million in an IPO , but those days are gone, and that has created this black hole for companies,” he said.

Speaking on a panel with Cuban, Weild noted that the “the number of small IPOs started to fall off a cliff in 1998 with the implementation of electronic stock markets.”

During that period, the number of initial offerings per year has fallen from about 500 to about 130, he said. Of those, 80 percent used to be firms raising less than $50 million; it is now down to 20 percent.