Anthropic IPO avoiding SpaceX slump key for US bank earnings

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Morgan Stanley posted record second-quarter equity trading revenue and higher underwriting fees, but SpaceX has since fallen below its offering price, putting the durability of the IPO pipeline in question.
• Anthropic is preparing to meet investors ahead of a potential October listing that could put it ahead of OpenAI and DeepSeek, with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan working on the offering.
• Analysts forecast equity trading revenue at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citigroup will jump 26% to top $74 billion in 2026.

Background

SpaceX has slumped below the price at which it sold shares to investors, erasing more than a trillion dollars of value since the peak it hit days after the largest listing in history. Short sellers have swarmed the stock, and a staggered lockup will free billions more shares before the year is out.

“Investors are rotating out of large tech, high-momentum names and SpaceX is in that basket,” said Joe Gilbert, portfolio manager at Integrity Asset Management. “We are not ready to suggest that the SpaceX IPO was the top of the market for big tech, but it seems like a strong signal now.”

The Issue

Whether Wall Street sustains its earnings run depends on Anthropic’s debut avoiding the pattern SpaceX set. Banks leading the offering are scheduling meetings between investors and the Claude chatbot maker, which is considering a listing as soon as October and is working with Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan on the offering. That timing would put it ahead of OpenAI, which is looking at 2027, and of DeepSeek. Anthropic was valued at $965 billion after a funding round in May, eclipsing OpenAI for the first time.

The second quarter showed the scale of what is at stake. Morgan Stanley took in $6.3 billion from equity trading, a 69% jump that broke its own record, while equity underwriting fees rose 70% to $851 million.

SpaceX’s listing paid its underwriters well. The company agreed to pay dealmakers a $500 million fee, with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley each taking roughly $100 million as lead banks. More than half of Morgan Stanley’s $148 billion of net new wealth assets were tied to listings. Founders and employees holding large stakes in newly public companies often look for places to invest the proceeds.

Goldman pointed to a deal pipeline that has kept building. “Our backlog increased to its highest level in five years and its second highest level on record,” said Goldman Chief Executive Officer David Solomon on a conference call with analysts.

“The markets are booming right now,” said JPMorgan Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon after posting record numbers. “It’s getting as close to as good as it gets. We just don’t know how long it’s going to last.”

Bloomberg Intelligence counts seven centicorns among the largest private companies with two of them, Anthropic and OpenAI, worth nearly a trillion dollars. Analysts forecast equity trading revenue at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Bank of America and Citigroup will jump 26% to top $74 billion in 2026, ease in 2027 and top $75 billion by 2028.

The cycle carries its own warning. The run-up in valuations and listings bears some similarity to the technology fever during Covid, which ended in a crash as the Federal Reserve raised rates. The weighted average return on 2026 US debuts has modestly lagged the US benchmark, and most companies that went public in the two months through mid-July trade below their offer price. SpaceX’s staggered lockup starts releasing shares in August, and the tradable float is set to swell to 5.33 billion shares by the end of the year from about 639 million.

Tracking

Track the relationship between IPOs and valuations, using ASKB.

• Run ASKB.
• Click the Workflows tab and Earnings Read-Across in the library.
• Type “MS US Equity” in the ticker box. Hit Run.
• In the Ask Followup box, paste this prompt: “Plot a bar chart of IPOs in the US over the past 10 years on a monthly basis using the Bloomberg database. In the same chart add a line for the monthly P/E ratio of the S&P 500. Is there a correlation between a bullish, high P/E environment and the volume of IPOs?”