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Comment by RicoElectrico | Hacker News Reader

Likewise, stock market IPOs are a parody now - not means of getting financing, but dumping the paper on the retail after for the insiders and VCs to realize their gains.

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Yes, it's downright stupid to buy into any tech IPO these days. The fundraising and all the growth were done by the A-M rounds, while the IPO is the bag-dump for the last few rounds of investors. Stay far away.

But serioslly when IPOs were not a sad joke? In early 1990s? But I think never.

In my ~20 year career half of which were well funded startups I made it to one IPO (multiple sole proprietor sales) with a bigcorp and my prize was having 3 years to buy my stock options at the IPO day strike-price, which was higher than the stock ever was in my last 2-3 years there.

In the end I made my million(th) sitting behind a cubicle collecting 401k which none of those startups gave me.

At this point we must have a drink to that.

Aren't all the insiders restricted from dumping their shares for a set number of months?

They're solving that problem. Look at Spacex. They not only got the rules changed for fast-tracked inclusion in Nasdaq and Russell indexes to pump the price on their garbage asset, they changed the rules so insiders could bail early. It was a one-two punch in service of making insiders richer at the expense of retail investors. Transparent corruption, where a few billionaires write the rules that allow them to reach into regular folks pockets.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/05/21/spacex-insiders-will-get-to-...

No. Look at the SpaceX lockup. It’s staggered with various groups getting ability to sell earlier than others. Well ahead of 6 months.

The lockup period is still in effect (for now) but reductions to index inclusion rules expose the stock to passive vehicles like ETFs that are obligated to have a specific allocation on the stock. So now there is an essentially guaranteed demand established by the time the lockup period expires. NASDAQ allows mega-cap companies into the NASDAQ-100 after 15 days which is much shorter than the lockup period for 80% of the SpaceX shares.

15 days - Pump: get into indexes -> ETFs obligated to buy shares

After - Dump: insiders cash out benefiting from the price premium of demand for shares from ETFs

Can you name a recent IPO that didn't put funds in the corporate coffers?

If the complaint is that people are investing in companies that are a Bad Bet, the solution is simple. Don't buy stocks that are you think are losers. That's the definition of insanity.

If someone wants to blindly invest money with zero diligence, then they have to be willing to accept the returns of a zero diligence bet.

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