Renaissance Capital: Q3 on track among slowest third quarters since 2014

Telis Demos, a writer for the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column who joined the paper in 2012 to cover IPOs and reported on offerings from Alibaba to Zillow, assessed the third-quarter IPO market in a Q&A with the CFO Journal newsletter. In Renaissance Capital’s third-quarter tracking, about 29% of IPOs priced below their expected ranges — almost double the highest quarterly rate in the prior four quarters, Demos said.

“This is a scary result for bankers and their clients,” Demos said. “Companies can go public pretty much whenever they want. But they can’t always get the price they want. So that is what is often the real decider.”

Renaissance Capital tallied 31 U.S. IPOs in the third quarter as of a report dated Sept. 24, putting the period on track to be among the slowest third quarters since 2014. “The fall IPO market has lost some of its mojo,” Renaissance Capital said in a note.

SpaceX’s successful IPO launch initially buoyed expectations that the window to go public was flung open, but market conditions have been pretty tepid since, Demos said. SpaceX shares have at times traded below the IPO price, which Demos said probably hasn’t helped matters for other would-be issuers. For an AI-focused company, it may help to see how Meta Platforms’ shares were boosted by excitement about its AI agent, Muse, Demos said.

Oura, the Silicon Valley maker of a smart-ring health tracker, is one of the highest-profile companies to postpone a planned fall listing amid the turbulence. Holtec Nuclear and Bamboo Insurance have also delayed their planned IPOs in recent days, and Anthropic has pushed back its own offering to November, the Journal reported. The string of postponements comes as investors grapple with volatile oil prices caused by disruptions to flows through the Strait of Hormuz and with AI safety concerns throwing into disarray what was expected to be a string of blockbuster IPOs this fall, the Journal’s Corrie Driebusch reported.

One indicator to watch is investment flows into equities, especially growth strategies. U.S. large-growth funds posted just their third monthly inflow in August over the past 15 months, according to Morningstar tracking. Whether investors stick with stocks, which have been broadly stable this month, or be drawn by rising yields into bond funds will help shape the appetite for new offerings.

Federal Reserve officials voted through the first interest-rate increase in three years at their September meeting. New York Fed President Williams said Tuesday in a speech in Buffalo, N.Y., that the Federal Reserve need not rush to continue raising interest rates. “With the policy action we took at our September meeting, there is no need for urgency. We have time to gather more information,” Williams said. Inflation “remains too high,” he said, and another rate increase “late this year” might be appropriate to restrain rising prices.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis is scheduled to release the personal-consumption expenditures price index for August and its third and final estimate of second-quarter gross-domestic-product growth.

Companies have raised $127 billion through IPOs so far in 2026, up 400% from 2025, the Journal reported.