that is 1 huge difference between the IPOs of now and even 10 years ago. you could buy stock in companies like Google or Salesforce that were still nowhere close to their maturation stage. sure it was hard to find that 50x bagger but at least it was possible. Now I doubt those exist

Markets are efficient. You could also have bought Pets.com.

> retail investors

I don't think the target is retail investors, at least not directly.

This is an unprecedented time when it comes to two things:

* The amount of money flowing into index ETFs that don't really discriminate what they buy

* The globally low interest rates leaving huge funds seeking returns anywhere they can find them

All they need to do to get a ton of interest is fit the criteria of some of the broad index ETFs (e.g. be listed within the S&P 500) or be more attractive than the competition.

I also don't think it's the assets/companies that are worth as much, but rather that currency has lost a ton of value - exponentially more than any of the reported inflation measures.

There's limited upside because most of the growth is gone, but there's still value in the same way Unilever has value. The problem is they're priced for hypergrowth. That said, Uber's still experiencing some growth.

Ugh, old data, but https://s3.amazonaws.com/cbi-research-portal-uploads/2019/05...

A successful company will have a trajectory like a sigmoid function (see above). The problem is IPO investors want in when growth still looks exponential.

Or you know, many companies are based on private valuations that are often gamed to boost the books of investors but don't match reality.