Vincent Boland: Hunting in Spacs – the craze sweeping the stock markets

The special purpose acquisition company phenomenon is an asset class in search of assets and its emergence is hardly surprising, given the IPO market’s structural problems, but these issues must be sorted out once and for all

Andy Neumann, co-founder and chief executive at WeWork, whose initial attempt to list on the stock market was one of the biggest flops in the history of Silicon Valley

In the summer of 2019, a company called WeWork tried to list on the stock market by the front door. Like every business taking the orthodox route of an initial public offering, the office rental company assembled a team of investment bankers and lawyers, published a fat prospectus offering potential investors a peek at its finances, and opened itself up to media scrutiny.

The upshot was one of the biggest flops in the history of ...