U.S. IPO market remains strong

There have been 290 traditional initial public offerings that raised $101 billion in proceeds this year through Sept. 17, according to Renaissance Capital. The number of deals and funds raised are higher than the yearly totals going back to at least 2012. Year to date, the dollar volume was more than double last year's $47 billion.

There have been some large IPOs over the last two years, such as Bumble's $2.2 billion pricing in January and Robinhood Markets' recent $2.1 billion deal, along with last year's Airbnb and DoorDash, helping boost the average size of the IPO. In 2020, IPOs raised about $359 million on average, compared with about $347 million this year. This is considerably higher than the $177 million to $290 million yearly numbers from 2015 to 2019.

The IPO aftermarket performance, measured by the Renaissance IPO index, is 8% this year, underperforming the Russell 3000 index by 10 percentage points. However, this comes after two years of outperforming the overall market, including last year's 110% increase that dwarfed the Russell 3000's 21% return. The Renaissance IPO index is rebalanced quarterly to add newly public companies while removing older ones.