BIO

I am a second year undergraduate student studying Finance from Annapolis, Maryland. I am the founder and president of the Florida State chapter of First Generation Investors, a member of the Equity Research Team as a part of the Securities Society club, and a research assistant through Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP).

SPACs, IPOs, and Social Media: A Comparative Study of Public Listing Options

Abstract

In my research I analyzed the relationships between IPO performance and social media activity. I particularly focused on this activity during and after the IPO quiet period. A quiet period can be defined as a, “...set amount of time when a company’s management and marketing teams cannot share opinions or additional information about the firm”. More specifically a quiet period, “...stretches from when a company files registration paperwork with U.S. regulators through the 40 days after the stock starts trading”. Although the quiet period starts when a company files registration paperwork, since this time period varies from company to company in order to have an equal measurement I instead started the 40 day period at the IPO’s initial trading date.
To study this relationship, I collected data on company name, ticker, initial trading date, initial listing price, open price, market cap, final trading date for quiet period, final price for quiet period, then I analyzed the performance during the period. Next, I collected data on the initial date of the following period, initial price, final trading date, final price, then I analyzed the performance. Finally, to measure social media activity I collected data on tweets, retweets, quote tweets, and a total of these three categories from the company’s twitter account. Although the initial results are preliminary, they were inconclusive. They didn’t suggest a positive or negative relationship between performance during the quiet period and social media activity in the following period.

Keywords: Stock, IPO, SPAC, Social Media, Finance