Market being dragged down by 2021’s flurry of IPOs, SPACs

CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Tuesday lamented the flurry of companies that went public in 2021 through traditional IPOs and SPAC deals, suggesting that it’s playing a role in Wall Street’s weak start to the new year.

“These newly minted stocks and SPACs are now killing us. It’s the excess supply that’s dragging down the rest of the market,” the “Mad Money” host said, explaining his belief that the weakness is not simply due to investors reconsidering valuations across the board.

“A stock market’s like any other market, if you get too much inventory, prices will plummet,” added Cramer, who contended the current dynamics remind him of the dot-com boom-and-bust cycle in the late 1990s and 2000s. He said it’s having consequences for many excellent companies that have been public for years.

“I want to believe that many of last year’s 600 IPOs are better than the 300 that we got in the dot-com era. But the recent action tells me they aren’t,” Cramer said. “These broken IPOs have emptied the pockets of investors, and they’re now tired of losing, yet they’re selling their winners to fund the over-hyped losers rather than take a hit that’s really already been taken for them.”

Cramer acknowledged highly regarded firms such as Netflix have reported “clunkers” for quarters. However, he said he thinks for the most part a broad brush is being applied to unprofitable, newly public companies and “actual companies” with real earnings.

For example, “last night IBM reported its best quarter in 11 years; its stock opened unchanged [because] everyone’s so negative,” Cramer said. “Then Wall Street comes to its senses. IBM roars,” he added, finishing up 5.65% Tuesday.

American Express and Johnson & Johnson are two more tried-and-true companies that reported Tuesday and had their shares react similarly to IBM, Cramer said.

“When you look at … the real companies with real earnings that have reported so far, the winners actually outnumber the losers” by a considerable margin, Cramer said. “Pretty amazing considering that I can’t even find 15 good companies out of the whole 600 odd enterprises that came public last year.”

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