20 Dec Cannabis Financings Top $1B for 2016

Our good friends at Viridian Capital Research (www.viridianca.com) track M&A deals and financings in the cannabis space in North America. They also run the cannabis stock index which gives us a good sense of how the stocks in the industry are trading.

The news they just released: financings in the space in 2016 have exceeded $1 billion! That’s about 300 deals. Most, or 239 of the deals, brought $836 million into public companies, and the rest for privates. This includes both the US and Canada. No question our northern friends are a few steps ahead of us given they have made marijuana legal on a federal basis, whereas that has yet to happen here in the US.

There remains some uncertainty following the Trump election as to whether his more positive views on legalization will rule the day vs. those of his Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions, who is strongly against legalizing pot. Most, however, believe that the worst case is things will not retreat to the times of raiding dispensaries and the like and the status quo, which is not ideal but is manageable, at least will continue.