Wall Street just wrapped the biggest first half for IPOs in its history. An IPO — initial public offering — is a company selling its shares to the public for the first time.
Traditional U.S. IPOs raised $130 billion in six months. That is a record. SpaceX supplied $86 billion of it in a single deal.
Then came Wednesday’s showstopper. Milan’s Bending Spoons — the company that rolled up AOL, Evernote, Vimeo and Eventbrite — went public at an $18 billion valuation. It priced at $29 a share and closed its first day up 40%.
Fourteen IPOs this year have each raised more than $1 billion. The average newly listed company is trading up about 24%.
More is coming. South Korea’s SK Hynix wants $29 billion through U.S.-listed shares. And AI rivals Anthropic and OpenAI — each valued near $850 billion — filed to go public within days of each other. Both could list after Labor Day.
Numbers like these make the phone ring. Clients ask whether the plan should grab a piece of the next big listing before it gets away. Fair question. The honest answer needs one look behind the curtain.
Who gets the pop
That 24% first-day jump is real money. It is just not your money.
Shares at the IPO price go to institutions — the giant funds that get the first phone call. By the time a regular investor can click buy, the pop has already happened. You are buying from the people who got the discount.
The Journal’s own fine print says it plainly: the big investors buying new issues are likely beating the market. Read that twice. The gain is engineered to land at the offer price — the one price you cannot get.
And the ride runs both directions. SpaceX dropped 16% in a single day in late June. A first-day gain can vanish faster than it arrived.
What the boom signals
A hot IPO market is a mood ring, not a menu. It tells you investors’ appetite for risk is running high. That is useful weather information.
It is not a shopping list. Chasing day-one prices is a coin flip dressed up as a growth strategy, and retirement money does not flip coins.
Windows this wide tend to open when everyone feels brave at once. Nobody rings a bell at the top of a market. A record half for new listings is at least a throat-clearing.
The patient way in
Here is the comfortable part. If these are great businesses, you will still get to own them — later, calmer, and without the games.
Once a company seasons and joins the major indexes, broad ownership of public markets picks it up automatically. No lockup — the rule that blocks insiders from selling for months, then expires all at once. No first-day whipsaw. No allocation list you were never on.
What about Anthropic and OpenAI? If they list, the same rules apply. A great company and a great stock are not the same thing on day one. Price decides which is which.
The companies worth owning will still be here after the confetti is swept up. Waiting costs a patient investor nothing. Most years, it pays.