IPO Market & Investment Bank League Tables 2025 (Feat. eToro, CoreWeave, Revolut, Figma...)

Hello and welcome back to The Deal Room. And today we are doing the state of the IPO market in 2025. And you're going to hear about big names. One of the biggest, in fact, in the last week has been eToro. And I've got to give a quick shout out to Sam North. I know you listen, Sam. Sam is a former member of the Amplify team. He is the lead face nowadays of eToro in terms of their training academy. And Sam, I hope you're getting your little slice of that IPO action because you deserve it, brother. So well done to Sam and the team at eToro. But yeah, really interested to hear Steven, your thoughts on that one. Then there's a few others. There's Hinge Health, Figma, there's the update on CoreWeave. There's lots to go over, but more so really want to put this into context of the year-to-date performance because we talk about M&A in the last few episodes quite a lot. We haven't talked about IPOs in a while, but I know we start talking then about cross-border. Listing, SPACs, PE, VC, IPO-led type of activities. And then because of a lot of people who listen are thinking about careers in finance, want to tie this back to the investment bank league tables. Who are the winners, losers? Who's really performing well? Who's, which banks are really on the pulse of some of these biggest listings? And then what does that look like in the composition of revenue within an equity capital markets division within a bank. So perhaps best place to start, Steven. Well, first of all, where are you? You, I mean, have you got a new office? Is this your new work office or what's going on?

Yeah, I mean, so not, not unlike eToro, who just had a very successful IPO, Amplify's doing very well as well. So I'm in a hotel, you might have heard of the Mandarin Oriental. I dunno if you, so it's a little bit like the Mandarin Oriental, but it's a Premier Inn. We actually, I'll tell you why, I'll tell you why I'm in a Premier Inn. It was because we were at an event last night, the Girls Are Investors Network. It was a summary of the internship preparation course that we do. So shout out to everyone who listens that has been part of the kind of Gain Network. It's a fantastic charity, fantastic organization. So I was there last night. Chatting about all sorts of different things, getting people onto the podcast. I think I must have shared your face on the podcast tile about 5 times. That's basically what I do these days. So yeah, it was good fun.

All right. Well, thanks, mate. So let's talk about, I guess, let's set the scene and let's talk about the IPO market overview year to date because, you know, we're 5 months in now.

Yeah, this is a really, really good one, and I think it's a fantastic representation of the need to go a couple of layers deeper to understand the driving forces of high-level statistics. So I can give you the performance metrics of the global IPO market, and I can say that in Q1 2025, there were 291 IPOs raising $29.3 billion globally. That was the third highest on record after 2021 and 2015. And in particular, let's focus in on the US because that's obviously the area that we, we speak about quite a lot. So Q1 2025, third strongest Q1 IPO performance in history. I'm just looking at the data here and there were 61, sorry, there were 62 IPOs in the US in Q1 2025 compared to 41 IPOs in Q1 2024. So that is an increase of 51%. And from a superficial perspective, you're thinking to yourself, wow, the IPO market is back, gangbusters, here we go. Now I'm looking at the same chart on the right-hand side of the chart. It's the same, but it's talking about year-on-year change in IPO proceeds. Remember, the volume of IPOs was 51% up. The change in proceeds is only 2% up. Now, this is where it gets interesting and important. So lots more IPOs, but the size of the IPOs are a lot smaller. So what's going on? You probably haven't heard too many headlines about you know, multi-billion dollar IPOs. And that's because the vast majority of these IPOs in the US have been based on either micro listings from predominantly Chinese companies, and I'm going to talk about that in a second, and special purpose acquisition companies, SPAC IPOs. So which ones do you want me to talk about first? Do you want me to talk about SPAC IPOs or do you want me to talk about micro listings? Come on, come on, Anthony.

Yeah, well, these are great topics because I think not everyone's going to be familiar with these. So perhaps, look, we'll go to SPAC second. So let's go micro first because I've never really heard of that.

This is super interesting. So if you go, uh, I'm just with another one of my tabs. I'm just on the NASDAQ IPO calendar website. And I'm looking at all of the IPOs that happened in April 2025. And I've ranked it from offer amount. That's how much they raised in their IPO, right? So at the top is a company called SmartStop Self-Storage Real Estate Investment Trust. So that's a REIT. That's a not a SPAC, that's not a micro raise. Then Shaggy Holdings at $411 million. Below those two IPOs, there are a raft of SPAC listings. Berto Acquisition Corp, New Providence Acquisition Corp, Titan Acquisition Corp, Citi Acquisition Corp, Inflection Point Acquisition Corp, all raising a good amount of money. But then you go to the next kind of rung down, below the acquisition corps. And then you've got, I would say at least half of the April listings under $15 million raised on the NASDAQ. So this is Caprina Holdings Cayman Limited, Topwin International Energies Group, TMD Energy, Bell Live Holdings, IO3 Limited, Master Beef Group, which I'm sure you've heard of, uh, Aether Holdings, Pinnacle Food Group, et cetera. So what the heck is going on? What are all of these micro, uh, what are all of these micro IPOs? So I looked into a few of these micro IPOs because this is an area that wasn't immediately familiar to me. Um, and these are big companies, but they're IPOing just a sliver, a really, really tiny sliver. So Pinnacle Food Group, for example, it's a $5 billion revenue company, but it only raised $7 million on its NASDAQ IPO. This is not a kind of ringing the bell mega IPO situation. What transpired, and this is why I would always encourage people to look below the surface level information. What basically happened is at the end of April, NASDAQ changed its rules on micro listings. Saying that you need to raise a minimum of $15 million and there needs to be a number of different, a number of different elements to getting you listed. It needs to be a certain percentage of your overall share capital. So basically blocking this route to companies, in particular Chinese companies and cross-border companies, basically getting into the NASDAQ almost through the back door. With a micro raise. And remember, once you've IPO'd, that opens up the US public markets investment to all of these companies. So it's super, super interesting that you would never hear about all of these companies that I've mentioned, but they formed the very, very long tail. And because the rules have been changing, they've— you'll see it in January, April, January, February, March, and April. You'll see these micro sub-$10 million listings getting in before the rules change. So let's take a look at Q2 when it comes out, and I can, well, I can't guarantee you, but I reckon that the number will be pretty flat quarter on quarter or year on year.

So how much of that money then do we know is like Chinese money in terms of how, you know, looking cloak and dagger? Is it China? Is it the bankers in China having some sort of dialogue and there's some sort of flow that's coming and they want access and so the bankers are going out drumming up business knowing that they've got this demand there? Like just trying to piece together, like where is this demand coming from? Is it companies wanting to raise money or is it companies that there's just the bankers looking to make deals rather than companies looking to raise money?

It's so interesting. And I think you're right with your kind of your cross-border analysis. So I've just got a little snippet from the FT. 53 of the past 2 quarters listings were from China and Hong Kong. And these were all pretty much all, I think 51 of the 53 were micro listings. So, and this is, and again, it's about circumventing the rules, but it's also about getting into getting a foothold in the US market in a very tariff-heavy environment or a very uncertain and volatile environment. And what's really interesting about this, I think you also mentioned, you know, is this that, you know, the bankers getting their payday. When you look at the banks on these tickets, these are not the big investment banks, right? I would say the minimum clip for Goldman Sachs to represent a company as lead bookrunner on an IPO It's probably $8 to $10 million. These companies are only raising $7 million. So they're tiny little banks that are helping them get this listing away. And that's in part because you don't need to do the book building process to the same extent, right? If you're raising $7 million, you don't need too many IPO investors to come in. It's also partly because the listing rules up until April 11th. Of this year were a lot looser on micro IPOs. So the full S-1 prospectus didn't need to get written in the same way. So you don't need the big investment banks. So yeah, it's a really, really interesting dynamic and one that probably we will see in Q1 of 2025, but we'll maybe never see again in the way that it's represented in the numbers.

Just in terms of actual names then, Are these names people would still be familiar with in terms of who does take these deals at this micro level?

Well, I tell you what, I had never heard of some of these organizations. I'm trying to find them now in my notes. I, yeah, really, really small boutiques, I would say, and maybe specialist boutiques that are geared towards this kind of cross-border small IPO. Market and will probably take a kind of 10% fee, you know, $500K to $1 million. So it's not probably an area to go hunting with regards to your graduate job. Let's just, let's just be honest.

It feels like these guys are more like, you know, like a Visa specialist where like they understand the process really well and the regulatory environment and they're just like, yep, we've got, we just like rinse, repeat, bang, bang, bang, high volume. Whereas Goldman Sachs is much more stuck in, right, doing these massive complicated deals. Yeah, it's interesting.

I think you are absolutely right. And I'm just looking again at the volume of these sub-$10 million deals. Again, mainly Chinese companies. And yeah, it must be a rinse and repeat because there were, you know, again, as I said, I think it was 53 companies in the last 2 quarters. If you IPO 53 proper IPOs, full fat IPOs in 2 quarters. That is, you know, that would be a world record breaking couple of quarters, right? You know, in terms of fees for the banks and things like that. So yeah, I think the Visa sponsorship model probably is closer to the truth than the full fat IPO process that we've spoken about.

Cool. All right. Well, look, you did mention the word SPAC, just conscious of some may not know what SPAC is first. So maybe just a quick definition of what that is and then how that plays into this IPO situation.

Yeah. So special purpose acquisition companies, it's super interesting. We've covered them on the podcast before, but they have, they had this SPAC IPOs had this absolute breakout year in 2021. And in my notes, you'll see a chart that looks at the IPO market volume of IPOs year on year for the last 10 years. And 2021 is about, is a skyscraper on the bar chart, about 10 times higher than any other year. Thanks largely to this breakout year for special purpose acquisition companies. And very, very quickly, special purpose acquisition companies are acquisition vehicles. They raise money through an IPO. And have that capital, that equity capital, and they are given 2 years to go out and find a normal company to merge with and then take that company into the public markets through that publicly listed acquisition vehicle. That process is called a SPAC merger or a de-SPAC when it stops becoming a special purpose acquisition company and actually ends up trading as the name of the company that it's acquired. And there's been lots of de-SPACs over the last few years. I just wanted to mention, I think we mentioned this on the podcast a few months ago, Oklo, which is the nuclear energy startup backed by our best friend Sam Altman, closed its SPAC merger and therefore de-SPACed in May 2024 and is now trading at around $32 a share. More than triple its SPAC IPO price of $10 a share. So, you know, love them or hate them, special purpose acquisition companies are not going away, and they are an alternative way of private companies getting a US public listing. And obviously the benefit for the private company is that they don't have to go through the really, really messy S-1 prospectus filing, underwriting, book building, IPO launch. Is it successful? Is it unsuccessful? They're kind of sneaking through the back door, right? And it's so interesting to see this market rebound because again, going back to 2021, we know that this was a bit of a wild, wild west for SPACs. All sorts of rubbish, quite frankly, was being was being acquired through the backdoor, was being IPO'd through this backdoor mechanism. And SPACs took a bit of a reputation blow because, you know, you might have invested in one of these SPAC acquisition vehicles. They, you know, that SPAC company, that SPAC acquisition vehicle would've bought a pretty rubbish company, and then your $10 a share would've dropped to 50 cents a share. And you're thinking, well, this is a bit of a, bit of a racket, but they bounced back and they accounted for 43% of all US IPOs in Q1, which is quite meaningful. And the reasons why this SPAC market is started to mature a bit. Gone are the heady days of just putting anything into a SPAC, putting anything into a SPAC merger. There are actually some really quite good companies that are being sought after by these SPAC IPO acquisition vehicles. So again, it's one of these things you get that, what is it? Is it the hype cycle? The Gartner hype cycle. You get the hype and then you get the trough of disillusionment and then you get the industry maturity. And I think that's probably what we've seen over the last 3 years. You've had the mega hype, you've had this horrible trough of disillusionment, And now we're just starting to see a slightly more rational market where more credible investors or more credible acquisition vehicles are getting set up by really, really credible organizations and investors and are actually finding some quite interesting targets. And I think OpFlow's not a bad example. It's a pretty legitimate company to take into the public markets.

Okay, so, so far it's all been quite US-centric. I just wondered in terms of IPO activity, what's it looking like elsewhere geography-wise?

Yeah, absolutely. So let's, let's cover some other markets. Asia-Pacific has had an interesting Q1. So 118, sorry, 116 IPOs across Asia-Pac. Relative to 118 at this time last year. But the IPO proceeds, unlike the US, the IPO proceeds are up 87%, $10.9 billion IPO proceeds relative to $5.8 billion in Q1 2024. Bearing in mind that $10.8 billion in Asia-Pac is $2 billion more than in the Americas. So again, we have our US-centric view because That's what people find quite interesting. But Asia-Pac has been flying and Asia-Pac has been flying in part due to Japan. And I've, me and you use this, use DealLogic quite a lot as a source of information. They have this lovely map that illustrates, represents all of the investment banking and deal data. And I'm just having a look at it at the moment. We've got Asia ex-Japan, this is year-to-date IPO proceeds. Asia ex-Japan up 12%. Not bad. Australasia up 14%, but less than $100 million of IPO proceeds. So don't worry too much about that. Japan up 404%. So this is really interesting. Japan, as we've spoken about before in the context of private equity deals, and the opening up and the renewed interest in Japan as an economy as it moves out of its deflationary cycle. And, you know, it's an economy that's really, really worth paying attention to. And there's a lot of activity going on and $3.4 billion of IPO proceeds in Japan alone. It's pretty interesting. It's definitely one to watch and it kind of makes up for a pretty limp performance across the rest of Asia.

Just a question then, is there any useful information when you start to peel off a few layers and start looking at, well, what actual types of companies can we categorize into sectors? So within these geographies, there's different stuff from a macro perspective going on, what's going on in like you said, Australasia or Japan or Europe are all, yes, impacted to a large part by the ongoing US-China conflict, but they all have their own unique situations happening economically. So I just wondered, is there any signals in the tea leaves of like, what are these companies? Do they all fit within one sector? Is it very spread? Is it quite diversified? Is there anything we can get a read from, from the sector basis?

Yeah, it's a really interesting one. I'm just going to go back to the US because that's unfortunately where I've got most of my data. But if you look at the US, the majority of IPOs so far this year have been in technology, TMT, technology, media, telecommunications, and health and life sciences. So health and life sciences obviously is a very enduring sector in the US and has always been a pretty fertile ground for IPOs because quite capital intensive. The IPO market understands, or public market investors understand health and life sciences, especially interesting breakthrough, you know, biotechnology, biopharma, pharmaceuticals, et cetera. There were also 8 energy IPOs. IPOs. Again, are we reading the tea leaves? But this is, again, these are pretty core US-focused industries that may be trying to kind of gin up US-focused investments and maybe are trying to protect themselves against the volatility by raising a bunch of money now instead of into the future. Who knows? I would have to do a little bit of digging to see whether that proportional split across TMT, health and life sciences, energy, et cetera, has been different throughout the last few years. But yeah, I mean, if this is something that students are interested in, the data's there, the tea leaves could be, could be interesting. I think maybe what would be more interesting or at least of equal interest is the timing, right? So you have this, I don't know what the best analogy is, but you have this kind of traffic jam or this production line of IPOs that are ready to go or almost ready to go. And you can see, if you look at any report, you can see IPOs that are mooted to happen, slated to happen in 2025, then IPOs that have actually been priced, then IPOs that have actually been launched. So it's kind of this production line. And so interesting, the timing of some of these big IPOs. So for example, eToro, and we'll talk about eToro in a second. eToro was about to go on April 4th, I think it was. And then obviously there was Liberation Day. And then they were like, no, no, no, no, no, I'm not going. I am pausing. And that was exactly the same for Figma. It was exactly the same for a number of other IPOs. They were like, all right, we're quite interested in it and we actually need to IPO this year. But as soon as April 2nd came along, you had 4 or 5 big IPOs coming off and saying, no, we're just going to wait a little bit. We're just going to see what happens. The likes of StubHub. Klarna, they were all going to go in Q1 or Q2 and they've decided, probably just going to wait. And this is actually why to an extent you see this very, very unbalanced IPO picture where, you know, there are only a few proper IPOs and the rest are SPACs and micro listings.

Yeah, this is probably a good segue then talking of SPACs, because I was just having a quick look and I do remember that the valuation, I think, of eToro was north of $10 billion and they were going to go public via a SPAC. I think that was during the peak of the tower, as you said, when that 2021, '22, it must have been. But yeah, talk to me about, it feels like those currents, definitely eToro, as you said, they couldn't have timed it better with this current market rebound and crypto move.

Yeah. And the current market rebound in terms of crypto, Coinbase going going great guns, which I think it's probably its closest competitor. I think it's up, Coinbase is up 50% in the last month. Slap myself on the wrist for selling all of my Coinbase shares about 8 months ago. But anyway, that's by the by. So eToro, you're absolutely right. In 2022, eToro was going to go public through a SPAC merger at a $10 billion valuation. Now that was scrapped due to market uncertainty, 2022 interest rate hiking cycle, wheels slightly coming off the SPAC market. And I think, oh no, and eToro, who IPO'd last week, priced at $52 a share, which exceeded its slated $46 to $50 range, raised about $620 million at a market cap of about $5.5 billion. So that's a pretty significant haircut based on what was going to be a $10 billion valuation in 2022. And you might be thinking to yourself, oh, these guys are suckers. You know, the founders and the early investors, they could have cashed in at $10 billion and oh, they've waited another 3 years and they're only pricing it at $5.4 billion. But this is a really, really important point when it comes to valuation negotiation in any startup or any company that's looking to raise money. It's not always prudent to raise at the very, very, very highest top of the market, most frothy valuation. Yes, you might be able to sell some of your shares at that frothy $10 billion valuation, but we know that momentum is very, very important. And if that SPAC had gone out at $10 billion and it started to drop, started to plummet, started to plummet, these kind of momentum plays have a bit of a mind of their own. And you could easily see this dropping well below $5 billion even before the lockup period of the initial investors in eToro and the founders of eToro, even before that lockup period ended, So, you know, you have to, it's sometimes prudent to go, hey, look, we'll take, we'll take $5.4 billion, right? We'll price it conservatively. We'll raise a decent amount of money and then we'll see what happens with the stock over the next 3 months, 6 months, year, 2 years. And, you know, let's just take a look at eToro stock. $52 a share. That's what it was priced. It ended the day up about 34%. I don't know what it is at the moment. I think it's probably around $70. So this is just a story of having a little bit of patience, having a little bit of prudence, not just going for the big shiny $10 billion number through a slightly volatile SPAC. And actually, look, as your ex-colleague will probably a test. I think the mood music in eToro is probably quite good.

Oh yeah, he's dropped me a few texts. But yeah, one other thing I was just looking at Coinbase, just to your point, that behavioral kind of finance element. I remember, I think it was '21, so when it was all like, you know, where's the next stop for Bitcoin? And we 1 million type talk and yeah, and the listing of Coinbase was coming. This was when Deliveroo was coming. So this was like peak COVID and everyone was like, right, Stimmy checks are coming, let's do this. And I remember that was an absolute, to your point, catastrophe of a listing. I think they sunk, like, was it 80, 90%, something like that shortly after listing? Oh yeah, that was a tough one.

Yeah, it was those ones. I think the other, another not comparable company, but another very well-hyped company was Rivian that IPO'd at about a $100 billion valuation riding off the coattails of Tesla. And yeah, sank about 95% and you started to realize that this thing is, this thing, it's more than just a little bit frothy. So IPO markets, they haven't bounced back and they're not at the level that they have been. If you look at a kind of historical last 20, 25, 30 years, but they are certainly more normalized than they were in 2021. A lot of private equity firms and other investors would prefer them to be a little bit more attractive, a little bit more buoyant, but they're not closed and they're not dead.

Okay, cool. Well, look, there's, I know there's some other companies. Why don't you give me the top headlines from some of these other big names?

Yeah, I just want to give you a few. I'm actually going to start by an update. I'm going to kind of go through 4 or 5 companies from companies that have already listed through to companies that haven't even priced yet, just to give you that kind of production line. So we mentioned CoreWeave. So CoreWeave IPO'd back in March at a $40 IPO price. Share price is hovering around $64 at the time of recording. So it's had a pretty nice pop. Remember that CoreWeave IPO, they had to decrease their price range and they had to decrease the amount that they wanted to raise due to the fact that investors just didn't like the dynamics of the company as much as maybe the IPO bankers were thinking. But you know what, it's had a pretty decent run. I still, as I've said on previous podcasts, I still wouldn't touch it because of the amount of debt the company has in its capital structure. So that's a company that IPO'd in March. A company that IPO'd in April, a company called Aspen Insurance. This is an— the reason why I wanted to bring this up was it's a private equity Apollo-owned company that raised $397.5 million at $30 apiece, right in the middle of its target range. This was on the 8th of May, actually. It valued the insurer at $2.76 billion. That was its market cap. This is interesting because Apollo took Aspen private in 2019, 6 years ago, and paid $2.6 billion. So when you're doing your money on money, your multiple of invested capital, your IRR, I'm sure they would've had very, very good ways of structuring the deal, et cetera. But that's not a great, that's not a great win for Apollo, unfortunately. So, you know, bear that in mind when we talk about private equity and the exit opportunities in the valuation environments that we do a lot of teaching on. Couple more, Hinge Health. So Hinge Health has been priced. So Hinge Health targets $3 billion valuation as IPO market signal comeback. That was the headline. So it's targeting a valuation of about $2.6 billion, raising over $437 million. That's a decent valuation, but again, it's Series E fundraising round. So startup fundraising, seed, Series A, B, C, D, E, F, depending on how much you have to raise, that valued the company at $6.2 billion. So this is so interesting. These hypey, hypey, frothy valuations in the venture capital space and in the private equity space. These VCs, the likes of Tiger Global and Coatue, who invested in the Series E of Hinge Health at $6.2 billion. They're now saying, look, we just have to take the hit, right? We just have to get something out of this. We valued this thing all wrong. We valued it at 6.2. We just got to get this thing off our books and we need to recycle some of the cash, right? And we're just going to IPO at 2.6 and hope, you know, they'll keep a stake in the company through IPO and into the public markets and hope that this thing really pops when it launches. And then the last one, which hasn't been priced yet, is Figma. And if you remember, Figma was about to be acquired. If you remember, this was about to be acquired for $20 billion by Adobe, but then it got blocked by antitrust. I think we covered it maybe this time last year. And again, expectation is that this IPO is going to go out well below $15 billion. It's still going to be a big IPO. But again, I'm just trying to kind of paint that picture that yes, IPOs are happening, but there's a real, there's a real dislocation between valuation parameters in the private markets, especially during that '21, '22 or 2020, 2021 frothy space. And now the cold hard reality of sophisticated long-only equity investors in public markets going, your 6.2 billion valuation, what was that all about? What were you smoking? We're going to slap a $2.6 billion number on it.

Perhaps we could talk about the UK just for a moment before we talk about league tables, because I know Revolut is one I keep reading about a lot, and that's going to be a big one, right?

It's going to be a big one if it happens. And I worry with all of these upcoming UK IPOs, I just worry that something will happen, which means that the likes of Revolut and the likes of Shein will find a really good excuse or will be lured into another market. And I just, I want to give you some very, very sorry context. The London stock market, you know, we've spoken about Japan, we've spoken about Asia, we've spoken about the US. The London stock market saw just 5 new listings in the first quarter of 2025, raising $74 million in proceeds. £74 million. Sorry, I do it. I do the market a disservice. I mean, that's pathetic. That is compared to the America, compared to the US, which raised not 8.9 billion compared to Japan, which raised 3.4 billion. We have raised on the London Stock Exchange previously the most fertile, largest stock exchange in the world. We've raised £75 million.

Quick question then. You get appointed, your phone, your mobile's ringing right now. And, uh, the PM goes, right, Steven, I've heard the podcast. You're the man. Fix this for me. What's the first things that you think to go to, to fix this problem?

To fix the problem of a lack of— well, I tell you what, and this is very, very live and in the news at the moment. There is a big push for UK pension funds, the biggest pool of capital available in the UK, all of our pension assets, pension money, investible pension money. There is a big call that a minimum percentage of these pension fund assets should be dedicated to UK listed companies. Now, classic supply and demand piece. If you're suddenly saying, all right, you're going to have to, you know, at least 15% or at least 10% of the assets under management or the asset ownership of these pension funds have to go into UK PLC, that is going to change the game. Like not necessarily overnight, but almost overnight because you have liquidity and you have demand, and that is going to push valuations up. Why do people— why would a company choose the US over the UK? Liquidity and valuation, right? Yes, there's a little bit of regulation and you can, you know, you can maybe soften some of the listing requirements in the UK as we've discussed on previous episodes. But the one that will really move the needle is just cash flowing in mandated so that you're like, all right, here we go. The UK's back. That's what I'm hoping for.

You heard that, Kier. Come on, give Stephen the call-up. Little side hustle here. Fix the UK. All right, so just to wrap then, let's talk about the league tables and perhaps not just the names, but the division of revenue at some of these banks would be great.

Yeah, so this is the equity capital markets teams sitting within the investment banks of the large kind of investment banks and the names that you, that I'll mention, you probably and definitely would've heard of. So taking a look at the Financial Times Investment Banking league tables, it's a very good place to go. And I'm looking at fees from equity capital markets transactions. So, so far, year to date, Goldman Sachs is in the lead bringing in $295 million of fees across equity capital markets. Now, very helpfully, the Financial Times also split those fees out into the different types of products that, or the different types of originations that happen within equity capital markets. And 55% of the fees for Goldman Sachs came from follow-ons. Now, follow-ons aren't nearly as sexy. They're not as hard to do, but they are additional equity raises from an existing publicly listed company. right? You don't just IPO and then that's it. It's 55% of their fees were from follow-ons. 19% of their fees were from convertibles. So convertible bonds, debt, like debt, but converts into equity at a certain strike price. So that's 19%. And then the other 26% were IPO proceeds. What's quite interesting is 26% of Goldman Sachs' fee revenue was IPO proceeds. But then if you actually look at the deal values, only 14% of Goldman Sachs' overall deal value was IPOs. So what does this tell me? That the fees per dollar of deal value for IPOs are much higher than the fees per dollar value for convertibles and for follow-ons because it's more complex, because it's harder. You have to go through the book building process. The roadshow, et cetera, et cetera. So just take a look at those tables if you're interested. You've obviously got the likes of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan. Goldman Sachs is 45% up in terms of deal values year on year. JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, Citigroup, UBS, and BNP closing out the top 8. And very, very similar story if you looked at this time last year. As well. So those are the banks that are the main movers and shakers in terms of the league tables for equity capital markets.

And just to add one layer of context then, so I think people would probably assume that Goldman's JP would top these types of things just given their presence, their magnitude in terms of size. What does that league table look like in terms of from this time last year? Like who are the movers and shakers? Like who's actually making paying when who's actually falling behind.

Yeah, it's a good point. I mean, Goldman, this time last year, actually, I'm going to take it for the whole of 2024. Goldman's, they were third. Goldman's are now first. JP Morgan were first. JP are now second. Morgan Stanley were second. They're now third. So there's been a little bit, again, it's kind of like the Premier League, right? You get the same few players. I'm a Nottingham Forest fan, so I don't know what the equivalent of Nottingham Forest breakout season barging into the top 6 or 7 in the table.

It's TD Securities.

It's TD Securities. They've had an absolute flyer and I have no— it really is TD Securities. I have no idea why they're there. They're 143% up change in fees versus previous period. I'm going to go away and have a little investigate.

But batting with the likes of Bank of America and Citi. So Although, you know, they might— you would naturally assume that that percentage is from a low base, which I'm assuming it is, but they're now at a level within just what, 12-month span of up there with the Bank of America of the world.

Yeah, absolutely. They brought in $184 million of fees so far this year, which is above Citi and Barclays and just below Bank of America. So yeah, obviously a few big deals. I can't, you know, I'm going to have to have a look into TD Securities, the Nottingham Forest. Of the equity capital markets league tables. There you go. There you go.

You never thought you'd hear that on this episode. So, all right, well, look, I know if you've listened to the end, thank you. I hope that was really insightful. And what I'll try my best to do, time and skills permitting, is try and bring in some of the charts. I know there's been quite a few comments on, if you watch this on YouTube, to bring up the charts when Steven's discussing some of this stuff. I'll give it a go. But a lot of this editing, I'd love to say is done by my podcast team, but yeah, I don't have one. So it's just me. And if I can work it out, I will add it. If not, I'll find some other ways to do it. So yeah, bear with me, but we'll have this episode out there and we'll try and do that in future because I know a lot of people have asked for it, but thank you for watching. Remember to subscribe to the channel if you don't already do so and share this with a friend. Really love to get this out to as many people as possible. And yeah, have a great week ahead. Thank you, Stephen.

Thank you, Ant.