Episode 85: Wall Street caps out a winning week
The Dow jumped 150 points, as Wall Street caps out a winning week amid growing optimism for the continuing recovery of the US economy. The S&P 500 ended the week up 1.2% and the Nasdaq rose 2.1%.
Shares of the so-called Reddit Stocks are making a reappearance and are now trading at record highs. With the major averages fairly range-bound for several weeks, investors are moving back to speculative pockets of the market. Meme stock AMC Entertainment is up 60% this week, and GameStop has returned more than 37% since Monday.
More than 240 SPACs were listed on the NASDAQ and NYSE last year, raising a record $83 billion, according to SPAC Research. SPACs have already surged past (all of 2020 or quarter over quarter), raising $98.1 billion. So far, 2021 has been a good year for traditional IPOs too, with 194 public launches raising $67 billion, according to Renaissance Capital. However, the boom that made 2020 the year of the SPAC started to cool this April, following warnings (of over-speculation?) by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
Corporate board diversity remains at the forefront of the conversation. In December, Nasdaq proposed a board diversity rule, which is under consideration by the SEC. At Workday and Fortune’s recent virtual CFO Collaborative event, Nasdaq CEO Adena Friedman said the primary portion of the proposal provides transparency around the composition of boards from a diversity perspective. “The second portion of the proposal is goals that we’ve set for the companies listed on Nasdaq to try to reach within the next four years—to have at least one woman and one underrepresented minority or LGBTQ member on the board,” Friedman said.
Markets This Week
Dow Jones Industrial Average 34,529 0.9%
S&P 500 Index 4,204 1.2%
NASDAQ 13,749 2.1%
IPO/SPAC
Acorns will merge with Pioneer Merger Corp., a publicly-traded special purpose acquisition company. The deal values Acorns at roughly $2.2 billion, more than double its last private valuation, and is expected to close in the back half of this year. “Now was the time to go public to accelerate our growth and get the tools of responsible wealth-making in everyone’s hands as fast as possible, when they need it most,” said CEO Noah Kerner.
LATAM
Rocketbot, a SaaS solutions platform, raised $2M pre-Series A funding round led by Grupo Consorcio. Angel Ventures, CompuSoluciones, and VC Manutara Ventures also contributed to the round. Rocketbot is a cloud-based solutions platform for the development of Robotic Process Automation (bots). Client companies can create their own ‘bots’ for their business processes. Rocketbot already serves more than 200 clients across Latin America.