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Comment by woolvalley | Hacker News Reader

The prep and planning required for these IPOs were done months before these market drops happened.

That is a meaningless statement. The decision to prepare is distinct from the decision to commit. It's farcical to imagine that these overvalued companies are just filing on sheer momentum. Doing it now is an affirmative decision. Also, the drop began two months ago and the signs of volatility where there in January.

To be fair, they have been talking of a 2019 IPO since more then a year ago.

Whatever the case, the exit-ramps are there at every stage and every moment until you do it. To play this as some kind of rolling ball that couldn't be stopped strains logic and seems basically counterfactual.

I disagree. I think the tension between getting your house in order enough to open your books to the public market and critically important employees waiting around for their stock-based compensation to trigger puts you between a rock and a hard place.

For Uber, it's do-or-die in 2019.

I would assume that when we’re talking about billions of dollars that the people in charge of creating an IPO strategy are a bit more ahead of the markets than the rest of us right? Full disclosure I’m not knowledgeable in this area, but it would seem to me that this is the case and having made plans months before the market turns isn’t necessarily proof that it isn’t being done with market knowledge. Just a thought.

From what I read in Matt Levine's bloomberg column - not really. Bankers make money by being middle men, not predicting the market.

Yah, there are people in finance who try and work out what the market is doing, but those people aren't really the people who work in M&A banking.

Global markets have been in a downward spiral since the beginning of this year, esp ex US (where most of the growth has been), and if you look at the divergence between the growth this year between US companies, fewer and fewer companies have been holding up the market.

Right but why now? Why would I want to invest in a company that would implode without private investment when we might be facing an economic downturn?

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