Turn back the clocks, social media is making a comeback!
Social media outlet Reddit, which bills itself as a community of communities and one of the Internet’s largest sources of information, has successfully priced its Initial Public Offering (IPO) raising proceeds of $748 million – of which $520 million will go to Reddit, and the remainder ($228 million) to selling shareholders.
The offering priced 22 million shares at $34 per share – the top of the advertised $31 to $34 range, which bodes well for the health of the overall IPO market and for the demand for Reddit stock in particular. Reddit stock will soon begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker RDDT.
Reddit was valued at $6.5 billion in the offering. The valuation is actually down from Reddit’s last private market financing round done in 2021, at about $10 billion.
Reddit’s IPO is the first public markets debut of a major social media player in almost five years, since Pinterest went public in April 2019 at $19 a share – for reference, Pinterest (NYSE:PINS) shares have done well overall (despite some ups and downs) are now sitting at about $34.75.
While there aren’t too many direct links to the FX and CFDs business in the Reddit IPO – other than Reddit being a very popular place for retail traders to share news and views about the industry and the brokers serving it – there certainly is a lesson to be learned for the retail-serving FX and CFDs brokers who are eyeing an IPO themselves.
At the top of that list is eToro, which is one of the more social-trading focused online brokers. eToro CEO Yoni Assia has been fairly vocal lately in discussing his company’s plans to go public, following a failed attempt at an IPO in 2021-22, when eToro attempted a SPAC merger. Other Retail FX and CFDs brokers who might look at an IPO if the market turned favorable include Saxo Bank and ThinkMarkets, both of which also tried (but failed) to go public recently, also via SPAC mergers.
