Considering the exceptionally expensive IPOs coming at us, such as SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic, I was curious as to historical examples of hotly anticipated IPOs and their correlation with market tops.
The clearest historical examples are these:
1. Palm / dot-com IPO wave — March 2000
This is probably the strongest example. Palm’s carve-out IPO from 3Com priced at $38 on March 2, 2000, opened at $150, traded as high as $165, and closed at $95.06 on its first day — a 150% first-day gain. Within the same month, the stock had already fallen more than 50% from its first-day close.
The mania was extreme enough that Palm’s first-day valuation created the famous “Palm–3Com stub” anomaly: Palm traded so richly that, arithmetically, the rest of 3Com was being valued at a large negative amount. Chicago Booth describes this as an extreme case of mispricing.
(more…)