IP Oh No? Recent Stock Market Debuts Have Fizzled. — Barrons.com

By Paul R. La Monica

So much for the comeback for initial public offerings.

Sure, companies like Circle Internet Group and Figma enjoyed stellar debuts this summer, surging from their IPO prices. But since then, several high-profile offerings — such as StubHub, Gemini Space Station, Klarna, Fermi, and Navan — have flopped. All five are trading well below both their IPO prices and their first-day closing prices.

StubHub, for instance, priced its offering at $23.50 a share and now trades for just $11.35. Gemini, which priced its IPO at $28, is now hovering a little above $10 a share.

In fact, only two of the 20 largest IPOs of the past six months were trading above their debut day closing prices as of December 1, according to FactSet and Dow Jones Market Data. Shares of education publishing company McGraw Hill are up nearly 2% from where they ended their first trading day in late July, while blockchain lending company Figure Technology Solutions has gained about 13% since its IPO on September 10.

And just eight of the 20 biggest IPOs, including Figure and McGraw Hill, were trading above their offering price, led by a nearly 145% pop for Circle. Figma; commercial washing machine and dryer maker Alliance Laundry Systems; biotech Caris Life Sciences; regional bank Central Bancompany; and Bullish, the crypto owner of CoinDesk, are also still above their IPO prices.

Investors seem to have soured on some of the top IPOs because many of them are still less mature companies that are laden with risk.

"Newly listed stocks are always more susceptible to market volatility than more established listed peers, and the volatility of the past few weeks seems to have taken a real toll on the performance of this year's IPO class," said Samuel Kerr, global head of equity capital markets at Mergermarket, in an email to Barron's.

"U.S. investors are clearly worried about stock valuations over the longer term and there therefore seems little appetite to hold newly listed stocks for a significant duration with investors choosing instead to monetize their holdings quickly after early share gains," Kerr added.

Still, there appears to be pent-up demand for IPOs going into 2026, with several big companies already prepared to list their stocks or rumored to be getting ready to file for IPOs.

Concerns about tariffs earlier this year, coupled with a slowdown in activity during the government shutdown this fall, have created a backlog of private companies waiting in the wings to head to Wall Street. And regulators in Washington seem open to making it easier for companies to go public with fewer disclosure requirements.

The more favorable environment for IPOs — combined with the Trump administration and Congress' embrace of stablecoins and other digital assets — should lead to more crypto IPOs as well. That's despite the struggles for Gemini, the crypto firm led by the Winklevoss twins of early Facebook fame, and the broad slide in Bitcoin prices over the past two months.

2026 is gearing up to be a big year for crypto IPOs, with the likes of Kraken, BitGo, Consensys, Blockchain.com, and Ledger all potentially on tap to go public next year. Digital asset management firm Grayscale Investments has also recently filed for an IPO, putting it on schedule to debut before the end of this year or in early 2026.

"The IPO pipeline for crypto companies is very healthy despite the volatility," said Zhong Yang Chan, head of research for CoinGecko, a crypto data firm, in an interview with Barron's.

Elliot Han, chief investment officer of C1 Fund, a closed-end investment firm that has stakes in Kraken as well as other private crypto firms such as Ripple, Figment, Chainalysis, and Alchemy, told Barron's that there would need to be "a complete meltdown" in both the crypto and stock markets to stop firms from doing IPOs next year.

"Crypto volatility will not deter these companies," Han said. "As long as the broader equity markets are all right, they will go public."

That might be true. But the significant stumbles for some newly public companies should make investors wary of buying IPOs on their first day of trading. It might be better to wait a couple of months, especially in a market as volatile as this one.

Write to Paul R. La Monica at paul.lamonica@barrons.com

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