After months of anticipation, SpaceX made history as the largest initial public offering (IPO) in market history.
It ended its first trading day with a valuation of just over $2 trillion, placing it squarely in the top 10 largest publicly traded companies in the United States
While IPOs are exciting for many investors, there’s also no shortage of uncertainty. With very little public track record, it’s hard to say how any IPO will perform over time. However, looking back at previous large IPOs shows that history offers one clear pattern: They tend to underperform the S&P 500 (SNPINDEX: ^GSPC).
Historically, many IPOs fail to impress Of the top 10 largest U.S. IPOs (measured by market value at the time they went public), eight have significantly underperformed the S&P 500. Collectively, these 10 stocks have fallen short of the benchmark index by a median of 127 percentage points, according to data from FactSet Research.