It's Wednesday, June 30th. Welcome to Marketfoolery. I'm Chris Hill with me today from the financial

capital of the United States of America. It's Marie and Gallagher. Thanks for being here.

Thanks so much for having me. Apologies in advance to the dozens of listeners for the degrading

quality of my voice. This keeps up. There's, there's probably, if there's no episode of Marketfoolery

tomorrow, that's why because this cold is just getting worse. Today we're going to talk allocation

strategy. We are definitely going to talk about Bumble's new business initiative, but let's start

with IPOs because we have already had more IPOs in the first half of this year than we did in

all of 2020. There are 18 IPOs this week. That is the most IPOs in a single week since 2004.

Before we get into one of the companies going public today, when you step back and look at sort of

the state of IPOs, what stands out to you? Yeah, so what's really interesting is you know,

a couple years ago, people said this was the hottest IPO market and then 2020 kind of cooled things

off, but then we're seeing this kind of pent up demand in this 2021 IPO market. So I mean, in general,

the global equity index has rose to new highs in 2021 and the IPO activity has reached its highest

level in over 20 years. I think it's a lot of positive market conditions driven by things like

government stimulus programs, post pandemic optimism, improved macroeconomic indicators,

improving unemployment, pent up demand, but the top industries recently for IPOs were the

financial sector, then technology, then healthcare, over 350 SPACs went public just in the first

quarter of 2021 alone. There were 332 SPACs going public in the first half of 2021, which is more

than all of this SPACs in 2020. And so it's been the best performing first quarter by deal number

and proceeds, like I said in the past 20 years. And I think that we're just seeing so much pent up

demand and so much of these companies, you know, getting a very positive reception when they come

into the market. So they're kind of pushing themselves out at a very rapid pace. I have to say it's

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