Wave of new stockmarket listings means investing just got fun again

A wave of new initial public offerings from exciting companies is enticing investors back into stockmarkets, says Matthew Lynn.

Illustration: IPO investors cheering
(Image credit: Illustration: IPO investors cheering)

If you just looked at a few stockmarket charts and blocked out everything else, you might come away thinking it had been a great year for the global economy. We have just seen the best few months for initial public offerings (IPOs) in two decades. Airbnb floated its shares with a value of just below $40bn – they almost immediately increased in value and the room-letting service ended up worth more than $100bn. C3.ai, the artificial-intelligence company, saw its shares rise 174% on its first day of trading. By comparison, the 70% rise in the first day of trading for the food-delivery company Doordash was relatively modest, but it still ended up with a value of more than $70bn. More IPOs are expected. Add in a rush of “special purpose acquisition companies” – shells set up simply to acquire other businesses – and it is clear that 2020 will set a record for new share issues. Even adjusting for inflation, the record set in 2000, at the height of the dotcom bubble, will be easily beaten.

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Matthew Lynn

Matthew Lynn is a columnist for Bloomberg, and writes weekly commentary syndicated in papers such as the Daily Telegraph, Die Welt, the Sydney Morning Herald, the South China Morning Post and the Miami Herald. He is also an associate editor of Spectator Business, and a regular contributor to The Spectator. Before that, he worked for the business section of the Sunday Times for ten years. 

He has written books on finance and financial topics, including Bust: Greece, The Euro and The Sovereign Debt Crisis and The Long Depression: The Slump of 2008 to 2031. Matthew is also the author of the Death Force series of military thrillers and the founder of Lume Books, an independent publisher.