"Anthropic's roadshow is selling the future of AI. Four centuries of hot IPOs say the first trade is rarely the best one."

The AI lab is asking for as much as $1.4 trillion at the top of its $70-to-$78 range, counting every possible share. Trading could start as soon as next week. Rival OpenAI may not be far behind: OpenAI president Greg Brockman said last week the company could be ready to go public next year.

"History has a warning for anyone planning to buy on the first day"

Apprently no bueno? (I'm sure I could spend the sum total of five minutes and find exceptions...)

The world's first IPO, the Dutch East India Company, began trading in 1602. Its stock took about three decades to double.
This year brought two fresh reminders. SpaceX opened at $150 in June, $15 above its IPO price, and soared about 40% in its first week. By August, it was in a nearly 30% hole. Five months later, SpaceX is still below its first trade.

Cerebras had it worse. The AI chipmaker opened at nearly double its $185 IPO price in May. Its first close is still its best, and the stock now trades at about half what IPO buyers paid.

REVENUE GROWTH: has been impressive and stellar, but nothing out of the ordinary for growth stars... plus, the valuation is fucking 29x sales -.-

University of Florida professor Jay Ritter tracked more than 4,000 IPOs of companies with at least $100 million in sales since 1980. Those priced at 20 to 40 times sales gained about 3% on average over three years from their first close. The cheapest gained about 41%.

IPOs of the biggest companies, those with more than $1 billion in sales, did about as well as the market.
A big first-day pop would make the math worse. A jump of about 40% would push Anthropic past 40 times sales, where IPOs lost nearly half their value over three years.

Prepare yourself to burn some serious passive and active capital!

THE POP:

That pop goes to whoever buys at the IPO offering price, usually big Wall Street firms and their wealthy clients. It has averaged nearly 20% since 1975, Ritter's data shows, and everyone buying after the open pays for it...

it's good to be an insider...

...This time, Anthropic is setting aside up to a fifth of its shares for retail brokers including Schwab, Fidelity, and Robinhood.

Wasn't there a similar convo about SpaceX earlier in the year?

ooooor, it's all just a silly stupid bubble?

Dan Niles of Niles Investment Management recalled the dot-com bust, when the S&P 500 staged seven rallies on the way down, to Yahoo Finance on Monday. "You'd be like, wow, it's a great time to invest. Except you would have lost 49% of your money because that's the tech bubble."