Big IPOs, No Profits — Sound Familiar?

May 2026

The financial news is dominated by the story of the three mega-IPOs expected imminently, priced at "demanding" valuations (to say the least). If these stocks make their way into indices in double quick time – as seems increasingly likely – there could be a material impact for passive investors, which we discuss in a Thinking Aloud paper here.

Do these big IPOs of unprofitable companies sound familiar? Earlier in May, Katie Martin noted in the FT: “Yesterday, on its first day of trading, AI chipmaker Cerebras closed 68 per cent above its IPO price; at one point early in the day it was up 108 per cent. Meanwhile, Ford, the car company founded in 1903, is up 20 per cent or so in the past two days following the launch of a unit that will make batteries for AI data centres. Are you old enough to remember what it felt like in markets in the spring of 2000? No? Well, we do, and it felt like this.” (Link here)

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