[dmurray]

From the company's side, there is a willingness to explore non-traditional methods of going public (see also: direct listings, or not going public at all). I would say this has been driven directly by a perception that companies leave money on the table in traditional IPOs, and indirectly by the rise of the "disruptor" mindset led by tech companies where CEOs are more willing to challenge the status quo.

From the investors' side, SPACs are popular because they've been really successful! I don't have stats on this but just buying SPACs surely outperformed any index in the last 5 years. You'd expect this effect to disappear as they get more popular, but it's worth noting that blindly buying IPOs has also been a really good investment strategy - enough first-day pops of 50% or 100% to outweigh the duds - though less accessible to small investors.

[alwayseasy]

> From the investors' side, SPACs are popular because they've been really successful! I don't have stats on this but just buying SPACs surely outperformed any index in the last 5 years.

According to Goldman Sachs, SPACs actually underperform traditional IPOs and the market after their merger.

Source: https://www.barrons.com/articles/spacs-performance-ipo-merge...

[hakfoo]

I'd suspect there's two different flows towards "non-traditional" listings.

There's the firms with clear market appeal who think they're getting underpriced by a conventional IPO model, but I suspect there's also firms who just want to bust onto the market and sidestep the normal disclosure and research cycle.