How to Shop for an ICO Offering
When shopping for an ICO offering you should know that although an ICO is an unregulated way of raising money, there are honest ways of conducting one. Sun Fund is setting standards for being compliant by being accountable to investors (in addition to having a proven, profitable business model underlying our ICO).
Check out our offer, by the way, at www.StartEngine.com/sun-fund-dc.
Start Engine is a member of FINRA and is SEC-registered.This means there is transparency for investors and accountability for our officers and a better degree of transparency for investors that may beat or exceed another ICO offering.
When offerers publish offers on platforms responsibly, you may see a lot of negative language around the future and possibilities. Its put in place so that investors make informed decisions, and also to protect businesses in case for some reason they cant execute their plan. It is a common convention, in business, to look at things that might be good indicators of the future, but it is also normal to avoid language expressly confirming the future because nobody knows what the future will hold. Forward-looking statements are a problem in business. When a business conducts an IPO (Initial Public Offering) they handle language about/around the future very sceptically.
As you look for an ICO offering in the US, there are at least two regulatory bodies involved with ICOs: the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). FINRA is non-governmental, the SEC is governmental.
The SEC is a United States government agency charged with regulating securities. The SEC protects investors, promotes fairness in the securities markets, and shares information about companies and investment professionals to help investors make informed decisions and invest with confidence, it says on their website. They can do things like take-down an ICO offering, or investigate an ICO offering they may think is acting in a way that is unsafe for public consumption.
FINRA is far less well-known but is an important part of your investment experience. It is a private corporation that acts as a self-regulatory organization according to Wikipedia, but the SEC is the ultimate regulatory authority in the United States. FINRA regulates platforms such as ours at StartEngine.com that set forth Regulation Crowdfund offers. They perform surveillance and examinations of Regulation CF platforms, they have reporting requirements, as well as eligibility requirements for those platforms. They also have a useful guide for avoiding ICO offering scams.
Investors may not have experience seeing negative language that from a marketing perspective could be perceived dissuasive: When you look at our language we use on our platform, thats the language we feel should be used for a Pre-ICO offer.
If you havent seen such language around PreICOs or ICOs you might want to ask what the other ICO offering language from ICO offerers *isnt* saying.