Becker Private Equity & Business Podcast
IPO Uncertainty: Market Volatility and Capital Trends with Matt Wolf of RSM 3-14-25
Fri, 14 Mar 2025
In this episode, Matt Wolf, Healthcare Senior Analyst at RSM, breaks down the latest market trends, including declining equity values, IPO delays, and the increasing reliance on private capital.
Chapter 1: What insights is Matt Wolf sharing about current market trends?
Hello, and welcome to the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast. My name is Chanel Bunger, and today I'm excited to speak with Matt Wolfe of RSM, who joins us weekly to share insights into economic trends he's keeping an eye on. Matt, thank you, as always, for joining me. Why don't you take it away and tell us about some of the things that you're seeing out there?
Chapter 2: What does the decline in public equity markets mean for IPO opportunities?
Yeah, thanks, Chanel. So, you know, we're watching capital market flows, of course, and particularly with lately looking at the actual public equity markets and what it might mean for IPO opportunities.
Chapter 3: How have recent market indices affected companies looking to go public?
As we look at the S&P 500 as of this recording, we're back down to 55, 45 or so, essentially erasing the gains that public equity markets have made since the Fed began cutting rates back in September. Sort of a coincidence, I guess, but Markets are back down. There's a bunch of factors for this. It's very important as companies look to raise potential IPOs.
Chapter 4: What challenges do companies face in meeting growth targets for 2024?
A lot of sponsors, a lot of companies have been looking to 2025 to be the year that the window, the IPO window would reopen and there'd be another way to access capital. But, you know, falling indices are not a good sign. And they're coming down for, like I said, multiple, multiple factors. So really, maybe in no particular order, you know, 2024 is
we saw a lot of solid growth given kind of a weak comparison to 2023, right? So we saw gains in 2024 given the, again, the weak or typical easy comp of comparing growth, 24 over 23. Well now, you know, showing growth over 24 is a much higher hurdle. So there are some fundamental sort of growth issues with a lot of companies not meeting targets or revising targets.
And that's brought equity prices down, certainly. Another one would be the uncertainty around tariffs and which tariffs will go into effect at what magnitudes when. Nobody really knows. There doesn't seem to be sort of a cohesive strategy or roadmap on tariffs. to answer really any of those questions.
And we're seeing retaliatory tariffs across the globe on these, and that's creating a huge downward pressure on equity values and in equity markets, which will delay, deter, defer, cancel IPOs, certainly. IPOs generally need a robust
equity market you know the individual companies looking to go public will need obviously strong sustainable growth stories to sell investors but they also sort of need the uh tailwind of strong strong equity market strong equity valuations and they're just not there so we expect that you know companies will continue to look to private capital private equity private credit as they look to expand and navigate these challenges but um at least so far where we said as of this recording
Equity markets are down back to September, August of 24 lows. And that does not bode well for companies and investors that are looking to tap the, you know, an initial public offering in 2025.
Perfect. Well, Matt, I want to thank you for always keeping us in the loop with everything and for joining me once again on the Vector Private Equity and Business Podcast. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Chanel.
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