Stats › Listings, IPOs and corporate actions › IPO statistics
IPO statistics and long run performance
New listings are the most exciting looking thing in the stock market and one of the most misread. A company comes to market, the price jumps on the first day, and the number that gets reported is that jump. The trouble is that almost nobody reading about it could have captured it.
This page is built on Jay Ritter's dataset at the University of Florida, which has been the reference for this subject for decades. It covers 9,253 US IPOs from 1980 to 2024 and it reports two things that point in opposite directions: a large average first day gain, and three year performance that trails the market badly. Both are true. They just describe two different buyers, and knowing which one you are settles most of the argument.
There's a second half about who is listing now, using Ritter's technology IPO table, and the shift there is worth a look. Companies come to market older and less often profitable than they used to. The exclusions behind these counts are strict and they're listed on the page, which is why the numbers here are much smaller than the IPO totals you'll see quoted in the press. Links and dates sit at the bottom if you want to open the tables yourself, and they're worth opening.
Across 9,253 US IPOs from 1980 to 2024, the average first day return was +18.9%. Over the following three years those same IPOs returned +19.1% raw, but -20.5% against the CRSP value weighted market index and -8.9% against size and value matched non IPO firms. In other words the pop is real and large, and the subsequent underperformance is real and large, and an investor who buys at the first closing price rather than at the offer price captures the second without the first.
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Below this point there are 8 sections, 1 chart, 1 table and 3 named sources, roughly 1300 words of it. Every figure carries the source it came from and the date the data is from.
You can keep browsing every statistic in the library for free. The intro and the summary are always open.