Why we only go where the pricing is broken
An essay on opaque markets, pricing intelligence, and the investment corridor Try Ventures was built to operate inside.
There is a particular kind of market that we find irresistible.
It is not defined by what it sells. It could be excavators or emeralds, yacht hulls or whiskey casks, racehorses or music rights. The asset class is almost irrelevant. What matters is the structure underneath.
These markets share the same condition. Volume is high. Transaction values are significant. And yet, when a buyer and a seller sit across a table from each other, neither of them really knows what the thing is worth. They have opinions. They have experience. They have a number that someone once told them, from a source whose interests they have never examined too closely. But they do not have pricing intelligence. Not real pricing intelligence. Not the kind that is current, data-driven, and free from the conflicts that quietly distort every valuation in the market.
So they transact anyway. They have to. Business does not wait for perfect information.
Between what a thing is listed for and what it actually clears for, capital is quietly misallocated. Every single day.
Imagine the same market with the lights on.
Now imagine that gap closes. Not partially. Substantially.
Buyers arrive at the table knowing what the asset is genuinely worth. Sellers price with confidence rather than hope. The negotiation that once took three weeks of posturing and counter-offers takes three days. The deal that once fell apart over a valuation dispute completes. The asset moves. Capital is freed. The next transaction begins.
Less debate. Less haggling. Less speculation. More trade. Faster returns. More getting on with the job.
This is not a utopian vision. It is simply what happens when markets have access to reliable pricing intelligence. We have seen it in real estate, in public equities, in commodity markets. When the data is good, markets function better. Participants are more confident. Transaction volumes rise. Liquidity improves.
When the US corporate bond market introduced mandatory price transparency in 2002, trade execution costs fell by around 50% for eligible bonds, with market-wide savings estimated at approximately $1 billion per year.
The businesses inside these markets grow faster. The institutions that finance them allocate capital more efficiently. The regulators who oversee them sleep better. Everyone wins, except the incumbents who built a business model on keeping the lights off.
This is not an accident.
Markets do not stay opaque by chance. They stay opaque because opacity has historically been profitable for the few at the centre of them.
In most of the markets we study, there is an incumbent. Sometimes it is a trade association. Sometimes it is a pricing service. Sometimes it is a publication that has been setting the reference price for so long that nobody remembers why they trusted it in the first place. These incumbents have built a business model on being the only source of pricing intelligence in their market, and they have had very little incentive to make that intelligence better, faster, or more useful to the people who actually need it.
The practitioners inside these markets, the dealers, the brokers, the surveyors, the specialists, all know this. They have always known it. They have built workarounds. Rules of thumb. Trusted contacts. A network of quiet phone calls that substitutes for data. They are not naive. They are simply operating inside a system that was never designed to serve them.
It is a condition that economists have understood since George Akerlof named it in 1970.
That system is now ready to change.
The corridor is not a sector. It is a condition.
We do not specialise in heavy machinery or marine vessels or fine wine because we believe those asset classes are uniquely interesting. We work across all of them because they all share the same structural problem. And because a methodology that solves that problem in one market can be retooled and redeployed in the next.
That is the corridor. A repeatable pattern of opacity, volume, incumbent complacency, and frustrated participants that appears again and again across markets that have nothing in common except the thing that matters most.
When we find it, we go in.
The global secondary market for construction equipment alone is valued at over $120 billion today.
We do not go in with a product. We do not go in with a pitch. We go in with a question: is the market hungry enough for better pricing intelligence to tell us so directly? We test that question before we build a single thing. If the answer is yes, we build. If the answer is no, we move on quickly and without sentiment.
What gets better when pricing gets better.
The benefits run further than the transaction itself.
Dealers turn inventory faster. Brokers close more deals in less time. Surveyors give advice they can stand behind. Lenders underwrite with confidence. Insurers price risk accurately. Asset managers allocate capital to where it genuinely belongs.
And underneath all of it, the market matures. It attracts more participants. It generates more liquidity. It becomes the kind of market that institutions trust, that new entrants want to enter, and that regulators point to as a functioning, efficient marketplace.
That is what we are building toward. One market at a time.
If you work inside one of these markets, you will recognise what we are describing. You will have felt the friction. You will have wondered why the dominant pricing reference in your market is so slow, so conflicted, or so obviously designed to serve someone other than you.
That friction is the signal. And it is the reason we are here.
We are not here to disrupt anything. We are here to illuminate it. And when markets are illuminated, everyone gets on with the job.