Anthropic just pushed its IPO back to November.

SpaceX showed you all 3 phases of a trade like this over the summer, and the first day was only one of them.

I was hoping this one would come sooner. The longer it takes, though, the more room there is for the perfect pre-trade, post-trade and post post-trade.

This is shaping up to be the largest tech IPO ever attempted, with a reported valuation around $2 trillion and up to $100 billion raised, and there’s a specific plan you can follow with a listing that size.

Start with SpaceX, because it’s the template.

It priced at $135, opened at $150 on June 12 and closed its first day at $160.95, up 19%. The Monday after, it ran another 20%. That run is the post-trade everybody remembers.

Then it stalled. Revenue nearly doubled last quarter, and the stock still sits below where it closed on day one, with its lowest close as a public company coming the day after it reported earnings.

The post post-trade is still ahead of it. A lock-up is the stretch after an IPO when early investors aren’t allowed to sell.

For SpaceX’s pre-IPO investors, those start coming off in staggered waves in December. Insiders, Musk included, stay locked for 366 days, a full year and about twice the usual 180.

Jay Ritter, the University of Florida professor who has studied IPOs for decades, looked at 45 companies that went public between 1980 and 2023 valued at more than 40 times their sales on day one. Only 7 were trading higher 3 years later, and on average they lost about half their value from that first-day close.

I don’t treat the first-day close as a starting line, and that research is a big part of why.

Now Anthropic. The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that it moved the IPO from October to November so it can show investors its third-quarter numbers first, and the timing could still shift. Annualized revenue topped $65 billion by the end of July, up from about $9 billion at the end of last year.

OpenAI has also confirmed it won’t go public this year at all, which leaves Anthropic as the one to watch.

I’m going live Wednesday to walk through the specific plan I followed with SpaceX, how I intend to run it on Anthropic phase by phase, and what I think is behind some of the doomsday talk around these IPOs. 

Your only option,
Mark Sebastian

P.S. Put December on your calendar. That’s when the first SpaceX lock-ups start coming off, the one phase of that trade still ahead of us, and the closest thing you’ll get to a preview of Anthropic’s third phase before it happens.