Geopolitics Unlikely to Put a Stop to IPOs, NYSE’s Martin Says
(Bloomberg) -- Global conflicts, including the strikes on Iran over the past week, are unlikely to put a complete stop to companies tapping the US public markets, according to NYSE Group Inc. President Lynn Martin said.
“There’s always going to be geopolitical events happening, and the political framework is always going to continue to evolve,” Martin said Tuesday in a Bloomberg Television interview at the Bloomberg Invest conference in New York. “And if you’re a good company, you can always go public.”
Initial public offerings pulled back in recent years as companies chose to remain private longer, the result of private-capital availability and the regulatory scrutiny that comes with being publicly traded. Bankers have been betting on an IPO boom in 2026, with mega-debuts such as Anthropic PBC and Elon Musk’s SpaceX expected to go public.
“I think companies need to be mindful of how anything that’s occurring on the geopolitical landscape is going to affect their businesses in the short term, medium term,” said Martin, who leads the largest US stock exchange.
Martin said last August that the IPO market is broadly open across sectors, arguing that companies coming to market after longer waits tend to be stronger and better prepared — sentiments she reiterated in Tuesday’s interview.
In the wide-ranging interview, Martin was also asked about the fast-growing world of prediction markets. NYSE Group would look at offering products in the prediction markets with regulatory guidance, Martin said.
“If there is a regulatory framework that allows for us to do it, we absolutely would look at that as an opportunity,” she said.
Last year, NYSE Group’s parent, Intercontinental Exchange Inc. committed to investing as much as $2 billion in crypto-based betting platform Polymarket. ICE will distribute Polymarket’s event-driven data, providing customers with sentiment indicators on topics in the market.
“The partnership’s going incredibly well,” Martin said. “It was really focused more on the data side and giving transparency.”
The New York Stock Exchange said earlier this year that it’s building a venue using blockchain technology to allow for trading tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds around the clock.
(Updates with additional Martin comments starting in sixth paragraph.)
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