We analyze Intellectual Ventures' patent portfolio. 33% of IV's assets from their January 2016 public list are gone today. 26% of US issued patents have expired. 10% of IV's issued US patents have sold, 96% went to NPEs, and the rate of sales is accelerating.

With the negative press around court decisions against patent holders, you might have heard that the patent market has collapsed/is collapsing. So, is it? In short, no.

At the ROL Group we perform quarterly analysis on patent packages offered for sale on the open market and our 2015 Q1 analysis showed that the number of sales is trending up significantly.

At the ROL Group we carefully track the packages for sale on the brokered patent market in our proprietary database.

The life of a patent broker has never been easy. Over the last year it has become even harder, with prices dropping and deal flow slowing.

The life of a patent broker has never been easy. Over the last year it has become even harder, with prices dropping and deal flow slowing.

IV's new fund bought 16% of all the packages sold in the first half of 2014. As a follow up to our article “What's Inside IV's Patent Portfolio?” we examined Intellectual Venture's recent buying practices, and in particular, buying for their new fund.

When analyzing a large patent portfolio it is often difficult to determine where to spend diligence dollars first. In order to direct us to the specific assets that are more likely to be interesting we developed an in house heuristic ranking system. It is based on static patent characteristics.