More intel.
As most of us know, Wall Street had a Parade in 2020, raising more money in the equity markets than in any other year besides 2007, if you can believe that.
Merger's and acquisitions also saw increased activity in the second half of 2020, up 88% compared to first half, and totaling 3.6tn for the year, surprising many experts..
“If you told me we would have a pandemic and that global M&A would still be flattish compared to last year, I would have been astonished.”
--Peter Orszag, chief executive of Lazard’s financial advisory business
“I think that when I look back, I don’t think I could have ever imagined any acquisitions happening this year“
--Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, Financial Times, December.31st
At one point last year, follow-on offerings were even outperforming the Nasdaq by almost 40% POST offering..
"Yet while the staggering amount of follow-on offerings is not news, the performance of companies selling their stock is nothing short of shocking, because whereas in a normal world the association dilution with new equity sales would in theory result in depressed stock prices, the reality of the past few months has been anything but. ...stocks sold in 2020 secondary offerings closed on Tuesday 39% above their offering price on average. That’s outpacing the year’s 28% gain in the Nasdaq Composite Index, a 40% outperformance."
That's INSANITY, by the way! But we all saw it..
Stocks like PEIX (ticker recently changed), GEVO, AREC, WWR; blockchain tickers, EV tickers, even marijuana tickers (SNDL) were all raising money with seemingly zero share price repercussions.
Usually when a company needs to dilute existing shareholders to continue running their operations, the shares are priced at a discount to the existing market price. This also increases the outstanding shares, which tends to scare short term traders, who see larger floats as a negative indicator for momentum, short squeeze potential, etc.