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SPAC issuance and performance
A SPAC is a company that lists on an exchange with no business at all. It raises cash, usually at $10 a unit, and then goes looking for a private company to merge with. If it finds one, the private company becomes public without going through a normal IPO. If it doesn't, the money goes back. People call them blank cheque companies, which is about right.
This page covers three things. How many listed each year, from 614 at the 2021 peak down to 31 in 2023 and back up to 144 in 2025. How many actually ended in a merger, which is about 56% of the ones old enough to have resolved. And what happened to the people who held on afterwards, which is the part that matters most. The returns research is blunt. For SPACs merging in 2019 and 2020, the median return over the following twelve months was minus 65.3%. A larger and later sample averaged minus 62%. And the explanation isn't that the businesses were unlucky, it's arithmetic: by the time a merger completes, median cash actually delivered was $6.67 per $10 share, with the rest lost to redemptions, sponsor stakes, warrants and fees.
I built this because SPACs are back, and the revival is running into a set of published findings that most of the coverage doesn't mention. Five sources, academic papers and trackers, all dated below. One of them is a study that disagrees with the others, and I've flagged it rather than leaving it out.
SPAC issuance peaked at 614 listings raising $144.9 billion in 2021, collapsed to 31 in 2023, and has revived to 144 in 2025 and 107 through mid June 2026. Of the roughly 1,300 SPACs old enough to have resolved, about 56% completed a merger and 37% liquidated. The returns literature is unambiguous: for SPACs merging in 2019 and 2020 the median twelve month post merger return was minus 65.3%, and for a larger 2020 to 2021 cohort the average was minus 62%, underperforming traditional IPOs by 26 percentage points. The mechanism is dilution, not bad luck.
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