{"id":180782,"date":"2025-12-08T09:11:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-08T09:11:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/180782\/"},"modified":"2025-12-08T09:11:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-08T09:11:12","slug":"a-350bn-anthropic-ipo-doesnt-make-this-a-bubble-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/180782\/","title":{"rendered":"A $350bn Anthropic IPO doesn\u2019t make this a bubble \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">A $350 billion Anthropic stock market flotation would seem, at first glance, like the sort of thing that happens only at the frothiest market peaks. Add in murmurs about another <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/artificial-intelligence\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/artificial-intelligence\/\">AI<\/a> giant, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/chatgpt\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/chatgpt\/\">ChatGPT<\/a> maker <a href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/openai\/\" target=\"_self\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" title=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/tags\/openai\/\">OpenAI<\/a>, going public and it\u2019s easy to assume we\u2019re reliving the late-1990s.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">However, if you look at the signal that mattered most back then \u2013 equity issuance \u2013 today looks nothing like 1999. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">So says portfolio manager and researcher Dr Owen Lamont, an expert in dotcom dynamics who has studied how managers behave when their shares are mispriced. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Firms tend to issue stock when they think it\u2019s expensive and repurchase when it\u2019s cheap. In the run-up to the 2000 crash, America\u2019s biggest companies were issuing equity \u201chand over fist\u201d. Cisco, Microsoft and their peers expanded their share counts even as retail investors poured in. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Insiders were selling, outsiders were buying \u2013 classic bubble dynamics.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Today\u2019s picture is the opposite. Of the five largest US companies, says Lamont, only one is issuing shares; the others are shrinking their floats. Current issuance levels look much like the past 20 years. Basically, the market is distributing cash to shareholders, not extracting it.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">None of this rules out speculative pockets in AI, nor does it predict that an Anthropic IPO would be sensibly priced. However, net issuance is \u201carguably the single best predictor of long-term stock returns\u201d, says Lamont, and today\u2019s figures strongly suggest the market is not behaving like a bubble.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">In 1999, issuance surged. Today, corporate America is buying back. Until that flips, the dot-com parallels don\u2019t quite hold.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A $350 billion Anthropic stock market flotation would seem, at first glance, like the sort of thing that&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":180783,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,3673,218,219,2670,61,60,1225,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-180782","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-anthropic","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-artificialintelligence","12":"tag-chatgpt","13":"tag-ie","14":"tag-ireland","15":"tag-open-ai","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180782","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180782"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180782\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/180783"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180782"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180782"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180782"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}