The 2026 IPO I missed and the one I dodged by pure luck

ipo season came back with a vengeance

The 2026 IPO market reopened with a force that nobody predicted at the start of the year. After a dismal 2025 that saw only 94 IPOs raise a combined $18.3 billion, the lowest total since 2016, the first half of 2026 delivered 67 fresh listings raising $42.8 billion. The resurgence was driven by a handful of blockbuster deals: Neuralink priced at $34 per share on March 12 and immediately popped 85% to $63 on the first day of trading. Stripe, the payments giant, debuted on April 3 at $42 an climbed to $78 within a week. And a company called Opal Insurance, an AI-powered property and casualty insurer, listed on May 19 at $28 and ran to $51 in three sessions.

I watched all of this from my apartment in Miami with a mix of envy and caution. I had participated in exactly one IPO in my life, a modest tech offering in 2021 that went public at $18 and dropped to $11 within a month. That experience left a scar that had maintained me out of the IPO market for five years. In 2026, with my portfolio sitting at about $340,000 across retirement accounts an a taxable brokerage account, I had the capital to allocate to fresh offerings if I chose to. The question was whether the 2026 IPO wave was a genuine opportunity or another trap for retail investors who invariably arrive late to the party.

neuralink and the FOMO I could not shake

Neuralink was the IPO that haunted me. The company, founded by Elon Musk an backed by Founders Fund, a16z, an the Saudi Public Investment Fund, had developed a brain-computer interface that had completed successful human trials for patients with paralysis. The clinical data was breathtaking. Three patients in the Phase II trial had regained the ability to control computer cursors and robotic arms using only neural signals. The FDA had granted breakthrough device designation, and the path to commercialization in the paralysis market alone was estimated at $8 billion to $12 billion in annual revenue by 2030.

The IPO priced at $34, valuing Neuralink at $38 billion. I had $15,000 in my taxable account that was sitting in a money market fund earning 4.8%, and I seriously weighed allocating $10,000 to Neuralink at the IPO price. My investment advisor counseled against it, arguing that the valuation implied perfection an that neural interface technology was too early-stage for a public market valuation of that magnitude. He pointed to the 85% first-day pop as evidence that retail investors who snagged at the IPO price had been allocated shares that institutions desperately wanted. He was right about the demand, but wrong about the investment thesis. Neuralink stock traded at $71 by late July, and my $10,000 would have grown to $20,882 in four months.

the fintech IPO I am glad I skipped

The IPO Im honestly grateful I missed was called Velocity Financial, a digital lending platform that priced on April 22 at $24 per share. The company had raised $2.1 billion in its offering, making it one of the largest fintech IPOs of the year. The prospectus painted an impressive picture: $1.8 billion in originated loans in 2025, a proprietary AI underwriting model that reduced default rates by 40% compared to traditional lenders, and partnerships with three major banks for loan servicing. The marketing was slick. The roadshow presentations featured testimonials from borrowers who had received personal loans in under four minutes. The narrative was designed to make you feel like Velocity was reinventing consumer lending.

I almost bit. The underwriters were Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which gave the deal credibility. The IPO was oversubscribed 12x, which created a sense of urgency. I had clicked through the prospectus twice and was literally about to submit an indication of interest for 200 shares, approximately $4,800, when I clocked a data point buried in the risk factors section on page 147 of the S-1 filing. Velocity's cost of funds had increased from 4.2% in 2024 to 7.8% in 2025 cuz the company relied on wholesale funding rather than deposits. The spread between what Velocity earned on loans (average yield of 14.2%) and what it dropped for funding (7.8%) was 6.4%, which read healthy until I compared it to the 8.1% spread the company had reported in 2024. The spread was compressing fast, and rising interest rates would only make it worse.

why Velocity collapsed after the IPO

Velocity opened at $27.50 on its first trading day, a modest 14.6% premium to the $24 IPO price. By the end of the first week, it had settled at $25.80. The quiet period ended on May 15, an the first analyst report from Citigroup came in with a sell rating and a price target of $16, arguing that the funding cost trajectory was unsustainable an that Velocity's AI underwriting model had not been tested thru a full credit cycle. The stock dropped to $19.50 on the downgrade. By June, Velocity reported its first quarterly earnings as a public company, missing revenue estimates by 18% and revealing that loan origination volume had declined 22% quarter over quarter as the company tightened credit standards. The stock fell to $9.80.

The 60% decline from the IPO price validated every concern I had about the business model. I had dodged a bullet by reading the fine print, or more accurately, by procrastinating long enough that the moment passed. Had I snagged 200 shares at $24, my position would be worth $1,960 rather of the $4,800 I would have invested. A loss of $2,840 that I would have stewed over all summer. The experience reinforced a principle I now treat as ironclad: rarely invest in a lending company without understanding its cost of funds. The spread between lending yield an funding cost is the entire business. If that spread is narrowing, nothing else matters.

what I learned about IPO allocation

The biggest frustration with IPOs is that the best deals are almost impossible for retail investors to access at the offering price. Neuralink popped 85% on day one, which means the people who made the real money were the institutional investors and hedge fund clients who received IPO allocations at $34. Retail investors like me could only buy at the inflated first-day price, which meant accepting a much modest margin of safety. The game is rigged in a way that feels subtle but is devastating over time. You get allocated shares in the dogs like Velocity Financial, and you get locked outta the winners like Neuralink an Stripe.

I did manage to get a slight allocation in the Stripe IPO thru my brokerage, which offered shares to customers with accounts above $100,000. I received 50 shares at the $42 offering price and sold em at $74 two weeks later for a gain of $1,600. It was not life-changing, but it validated the approach of participating selectively and selling swiftly. I had been gripping those Stripe shares in an account that also contained a Roth IRA conversion I had completed in January, moving $12,000 from a traditional IRA to take advantage of a low-income year after I took a sabbatical in the fall of 2025. The tax-free growth potential of the Roth made me comfortable taking calculated risks with the taxable account.

the one IPO I actually made money on

Stripe was the exception that proved my framework wrong, sorta. I received 50 shares at the $42 offering price thru a retail allocation program my brokerage offered to accounts over $100,000. I sold two weeks later at $74 for a $1,600 gain that read almost too easy. The difference with Stripe was that the company had been profitable for years, had a clear and dominant market position in online payments, and was priced at approximately 9.5x trailing revenue at IPO. It passed all three of my criteria. The $1,600 dropped for a long weekend in the Florida Keys with my girlfriend, and I did not think about Stripe again for months. That emotional detachment is the clearest sign I have found that an investment was well-considered rather than impulse-driven.

my new IPO framework

After the Neuralink miss and the Velocity dodge, I developed a simple framework for evaluating IPOs goin forward. One, the company must be profitable on a GAAP basis, or within six months of reaching GAAP profitability. Two, the IPO valuation must be below 10x trailing revenue. Three, the company must have a clear path to positive free cash flow within twelve months. Neuralink would have passed my revenue multiple test at IPO but failed the profitability requirement. Velocity would have failed all three criteria. Stripe would have passed on profitability but barely, with the revenue multiple sitting at around 9.5x trailing twelve-month revenue.

This framework is conservative, and it will cause me to miss some high-growth offerings. That is the trade-off Im willing to accept. The capital gains tax rate on short-term gains is already punishing enough without adding IPO speculation risk on top of it. I would rather earn a steady 8% to 10% in a diversified ETF portfolio than chase 80% first-day pops that I cannot access at the offering price anyway. The IPO market is a casino where the house invariably wins, an the retail investor is the house. I am done being the house.