Dear Reader,
This is Dylan Jovine with Behind the Markets.
Happy Thursday. Today is Thursday, May 28th. What a great day it is to be alive.
We have a lot of big companies getting ready to go public.
A Runway Full of IPOs
SpaceX, most famously.
OpenAI sounds like it's coming this year.
Anthropic — the maker of Claude — is also on deck.
These companies are going to absorb an enormous amount of capital when they hit the market.
So I thought it was worth taking a look at how recent tech IPOs have actually performed over the past year — because the data tells you something interesting.
What Recent IPOs Are Telling Us
Here is a quick look at select tech companies since going public in 2025.
Circle — the crypto stablecoin issuer — is up almost 300%. That company was priced really well, especially considering the crypto market was cold when it came out.
It was underpriced and ran hard after crypto legislation gave it a tailwind.
CoreWeave is up almost 175%.
Fervo Energy — a data center energy play I've been watching — is up about 30%.
Cerebras is up about 20%.
HawkEye 360, a drone and satellite company, is also up about 20%.
On the other side: Figma is down about 25%. Chime is down. StubHub is down about 35%. Klarna is down about 35%. Bitco's down about 40%.
The pattern is clear.
If you have AI, data centers, or energy in your name, you tend to do well.
If you don't, the market has been brutal.
Who Actually Makes Money on IPOs
Here is the thing most people don't understand about IPOs.
The people who make money — whether the stock goes up or down after it goes public — are the people who got in early in the private rounds.
That’s why this week we hosted an invite-only webinar, where we discussed the data compression company partnered with Nvidia, Viasat, Intel, and US Space Command.
If you missed the event, check out the replay here before we have to take it down.
Those are the guys who win here, win there, win everywhere.
When a company like SpaceX goes public at $1.75 trillion, the early private investors who got in at $100 billion are making 10x to 20x their money.
The public investor buying on IPO day is taking all the risk at the highest valuation.
Now, the banking side of this is genuinely fascinating.
The bankers are doing something that is, frankly, engineered and legal manipulation.
They're gauging investor interest — if it's a level 10, they price the deal at $2 trillion. If it's a level 6, maybe $1.5 trillion.
They want to satisfy the company — which wants to sell shares at the highest possible price — while also keeping it attractive enough that it doesn't immediately drop like a rock after going public.
Getting that balance right is a genuine art form.
There are greenshoes, price support mechanisms, all kinds of things happening behind the scenes to keep the stock stable until the market can absorb it on its own.
It's deal-making at the highest level.
What This Means for the Market Overall
As an aside — a lot of people have been asking me what I think about the overall health of the market.
I'll have more specific thoughts tomorrow.
But here is one thing I know.
You don't bring companies public unless the market looks strong.
Ben Graham said famously that you could tell the end of a bull market by the quality of companies going public.
What he meant was: a bull market is over when garbage starts going public.
At the beginning of a cycle, the best companies — the ones that have been waiting the longest — go first.
Right now, we are watching OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX prepare to go public.
These are not garbage companies.
From where I stand, it's hard to not have a bullish bias overall.
Anyway, that's all I have.
Have a wonderful Thursday.
I'll see you tomorrow.
“The Buck Stops Here,”
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Written by Dylan Jovine