One planning insight. Two charts that caught our eye. Helping you stay the course in under three minutes.
Planning Insight | June 2026
The Most Hyped IPOs in History Are Coming. Should You Bite?
It is not often that Wall Street rolls out a blockbuster IPO. This year it is rolling out three at once. SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI are all racing toward the public markets, and any one of them could land among the biggest debuts the market has ever seen. SpaceX alone is reportedly chasing a valuation north of $1.7 trillion. Together, the three could ask investors for more than $200 billion. For context, every US IPO combined raised about $45 billion in all of 2025.
The hype is real. The fear of missing out is louder. But before you start refreshing your brokerage app on listing day, it is worth asking a far less exciting question: do IPOs actually make good investments?
The data says, usually not. Dimensional studied more than 6,000 US IPOs from 1991 to 2018. As a group, they trailed the broad market, and it was not particularly close.
Why the gap? IPOs tend to behave like small, fast-growing, not-yet-profitable companies that pour every dollar back into growth. Historically, that exact profile has carried lower expected returns, not higher ones. Great story, underwhelming receipts.
There are two other catches the headlines skip over.
First, you probably cannot get the pop. Those eye-popping first-day gains are handed to institutions and the favored clients of the underwriting banks. The allocations that trickle down to everyone else tend to be the deals nobody fought over. We just watched chipmaker Cerebras jump nearly 70% on day one and then hand back a chunk the very next session. Figma went from $33 to $143 to $22 in about eight months. The fireworks are real, but so is the hangover.
Second, lockup periods restrict when insiders can sell for the first six to twelve months. When that gate lifts, a fresh wave of selling can arrive right as the buzz wears off.
Here is the part that should actually make you feel better: if you own a diversified portfolio, you are not missing out. These companies eventually get folded into the indexes you already own, at scale, with no allocation lottery to win and no listing day to time. You get the long-term story without paying the day-one tax.
None of this means SpaceX, Anthropic, or OpenAI are bad companies. They may turn out to be terrific ones. But a great company and a great investment are not the same thing, especially at the price the headlines are quoting. It is a little like a golfer buying a shiny new driver because a brand promised 20 extra yards: the marketing is convincing and exciting, but sometimes you just find the trees faster. And in investing, the most convincing and exciting opportunity in the room is rarely the best one.
In our recent YouTube video, we break down why IPOs so often fail to live up to the hype.
What Caught Our Eye
A couple of charts and graphics we found insightful this month.
Your summer flights just got pricier.
US airline fuel costs spiked 78% in a single month to $4.11 a gallon as the Iran War jolted energy markets. The pain is already showing up at the gate: airfares climbed 20.7% year over year in April, and airlines worldwide are staring down an estimated $100 billion in extra fuel costs this year.
The quiet winner.
Over the past five years, the S&P 500 posted a strong 12.1%. But international large value, the corner of the market almost no one was talking about, quietly topped it at 15.2%. The best-performing asset class is rarely the one making headlines.
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