Hello everyone and welcome to At Bairns. I'm Andy Surwer. And welcome to our guest, Lynn Martin, President of the New York Stock Exchange. Lynn, great to see you.

Great to see you too. Thanks for having me on, Andy. So you recently wrote about three trends for this year, which are volatility, the return of the IPO market, and the

strength of the U.S. capital markets. I want to ask you about all three of them. Starting with

IPOs, it looked like we're off to a good start in January. I wonder how the pipeline,

confidential filings is going, and what you anticipate for the balance of the year.

Yeah, we're off to a really encouraging start in January.

If I look at January of 2024 compared with January 2022,

proceeds raised are up almost 70%.

So that's really a great sign.

Still off from 21, but I view 21 is more of one of the tails in the overall bell curve of the U.S.

Capital Markets.

So really strong start.

Big deals getting done across multiple sectors.

I'm very optimistic that we're going to see more deals come to market.

We've had a few in February.

We're gearing up for an active March, April, whatever the case may be,

very strong pipeline of companies looking to tap the capital markets.

Is there some hesitancy and reluctance given the uncertainty out there,

which maybe goes into the volatility question?

You know, the biggest challenge, I think, with the IPO markets has really been

sponsors getting their heads around the new valuations, right?

Everyone got used to valuations being elevated in 2020, 2021.

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