That is so important. There are currently 600 SPACs, more than 600 SPACs that are looking

for companies to buy. And if you think about that, do you think right now there are 8,000

publicly traded companies in the United States? So not an apples to oranges comparison.

Do you think that there are 600 companies that are ready to go public right now?

I'm Chris Hill and that was Motley Fool Senior Analyst Bill Mann. You remember the great

SPAC boom of 2020 and 2021, right? Bill and Lewis and Bill Mann are taking a second

look at what happened. When more than $240 billion flowed into blank check companies

over a two year period. And so far, most of them haven't really done so well. Out of nearly

200 companies that used a SPAC to go public last year, just 11% trade above their offering

price. And some of the most talked about companies, including Nikola and Virgin Galactic, are

down about 90% from their all time highs. The guys break down the incentives that created

the boom, the rare SPACs that are showing some promise, and one arbitrage opportunity

investors might want to know about.

We're checking in on SPACs and trying to pull lessons from the past two years. Bill

Mann, thanks for joining me to walk through it all. How are you? I'm doing all right.

Perhaps not as good as the recent SPAC classes are doing. You've been investing a long time

Bill. You have seen the market through cycles, through crashes, through FADS. If you could

capture the roller coaster of SPACs over the past couple of years, how would you do it

in a sense or two? Really how I would do it is to say this. There ain't no such thing

as a free launch. I mean, SPACs became spectacularly popular in 2020 and 2021. In 2020, there were

83 billion dollars worth of deals that were launched through new SPACs in 2021. That

number was 161 billion. You have to ask yourself why a formerly somewhat disreputable way

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