SpaceX and Anthropic mega-IPOs could mark end of bull run, Bank of America suggests

The SpaceX and Anthropic mega-IPOs may not be the boon to the stock market investors think they'll be. Wall Street has been rolling out the red carpet for some of the most eagerly anticipated public debuts in recent memory — helped along by the Trump administration's initiative to deregulate public and private markets to "make IPOs great again" — with index providers changing their rules for faster inclusion and rejiggering the math on free float multiples. But those accommodations "smack of late-stage machinations" that could signal the end of the stock market's bull run, Bank of America suggested. The late stage of the investment cycle refers to the highly speculative period in which amateur buyers bid up securities, quietly offloaded by institutional investors, that precedes a downturn. The massive IPOs could also flood the market with shares, which could actually hurt prices, according to the firm's equity and quant strategist Savita Subramanian. The shrinking number of shares in the investable universe has been one of the pillars of recent bull markets. The number of publicly traded securities dropped to roughly 4,000 last year from a peak of more than 8,000 back in the 1990s, according to the Center for Research in Security Prices. …