Hello, this is Alex, and you are listening to Equity Monday for October 19th, 2020.

Here's what's up this morning.

American stocks are set to rise with the tech-heavy NASDAQ prepped to gain about 1% at the open.

Now, why do we care? Well, after some selling last week, with stocks

set to balance any concerns that investors or founders had about our short-term correction can ease.

That's good news. However, new data shows that Europe is really lagging behind

in VC-backed IPOs this year. According to some pitchbook data that CNBC reported,

there have been 26 VC-backed IPOs in Europe this year.

There have been 70 in the US and 92 in China.

So what's up with that EU number?

What's going on over in Europe?

Good news is, I'm catching up with Frederick

Castle an EU-based investor for Criandum, an EU-based VC firm on its fifth fund

later this week. I want to know what's up with that low IPO number and what

does it mean for European startups?

All right, before we start you can follow Equity on Twitter at Equity Pond or myself on

Twitter where I go by at Alex and with that let's begin. All right, so talking about the weekend, well, here's what's up.

As the American election looms and the holidays beckon,

things kind of slow down this weekend.

Now, it's a little bit soon to say that this is the new normal,

but certainly it felt more like a traditional late October weekend, if that makes sense.

So posts covering new rounds were a little bit light. There wasn't a lot of news. There wasn't a big acquisition that drove the Monday morning chat cycle.

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