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
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 ...