Call it Wall Street’s Groundhog Day.
When shares of Arm, the British chip designer, began trading on the Nasdaq stock exchange on Thursday in the year’s biggest initial public offering, investors, tech executives, bankers and start-up founders were watching closely for how it performed.
If Arm’s stock fell, they knew the market for I.P.O.s was likely to stay frozen for longer. But a warm welcome for the shares would probably mean many more companies going public in the coming months, ending the cold streak.
They quickly got their answer: It was an early spring. Arm’s shares opened trading at $56.10, up 10 percent from its initial offering price of $51. Shares quickly rose above that, hitting $59.
That is positive news for listings from the grocery delivery start-up Instacart and the advertising tech company Klaviyo, which are expected to go public next week. It also provides a boost to the entire tech industry, which has been waiting for market conditions to improve for nearly two years.
In this year’s largest IPO arm rises more than 10%
“Offerings like this are often beacons to try to decipher what is the sentiment, overall, of this marketplace,” said David Hsu, a professor of management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
Arm’s debut may encourage other companies to tap the public markets, he said. “If you can break a logjam in one important corner of this private market, that tends to flow all the way down to the private capital providers.”
Arm is the largest company to brave the public markets in 2023, a year that has been almost deathly quiet for I.P.O.s. The chip designer, which is owned by SoftBank, had priced its offering on Wednesday at $51 a share, raising $4.87 billion and valuing the company at $54.5 billion.
Arm Rises More Than 10% in the Year’s Biggest Initial Public Offering