(Bloomberg) -- After Americans feast on Thanksgiving, the country’s bankers expect investors will devour sizable initial public offerings stuffed into the final window of the year for company debuts.
A handful of US deals are expected during the holiday season between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Among them is a potential $3 billion offering from Venture Global LNG Inc. that could mark the second-largest IPO this year after Lineage Inc.’s $5.1 billion deal. In addition, software provider ServiceTitan Inc. has filed for an IPO and is also expected to begin trading before the end of the year. A funding round from 2022 valued the firm at $7.6 billion.
If just those two deals trade after Thanksgiving, 2024’s IPO season would end on a relative high note, with the best holiday season for the market since 2021, data compiled by Bloomberg show. So far this year, 215 firms have gone public, with companies raising over $40 billion. The best month of the year for US IPOs was July, when $8.6 billion was raised.
“I think there’s going to be some decent flow between Thanksgiving and the year-end,” said Josef Schuster, founder of IPOX Schuster LLC. He said there have been “technicalities” and challenges in trying to price an IPO ahead of Thanksgiving and so soon after the US presidential election, which placed Republican Donald Trump back in the White House.
The election’s swift and uncontested outcome has set up a better regulatory outlook for Venture Global, given expectations that Trump will lift a ban on new LNG facilities. Autonomous mobility firm Pony AI Inc., which is seeking as much as $195 million through an IPO, is also poised to benefit from Trump’s support for self-driving technology. Pony AI is expected to begin trading this week.
READ: Pony AI Boosts US IPO Size to 20m American Depositary Shares
That puts the IPO market in position to end with a few large deals, not a flood of issuance, industry executives said.
“I don’t expect fireworks through the end of the year,” said Mark Schwartz, IPO and SPAC advisory leader at EY. He called it a “tricky” window with tight timelines, and noted that just a few companies updated their filings in recent weeks, which is an indication that they intend to price their offerings.
“In order to get full optionality for that window, you really need to be out there and filed, if not today, then nearly by now,” Schwartz said. “It’s a very, very short window.”
The stock market rally has provided a big incentive to companies that want to price in the final weeks of this year.
IPOX’S Schuster expects companies including Venture Global to debut soon, even if the post-Thanksgiving window is too tight for them to do it in 2024.
“There’s definitely going to be a push for going public as soon as possible,” Schuster said.
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