Checking in on the Share Price of 2019's "Unicorn" IPOs

The year 2019 is being called the year of the “unicorn stampede,” with many billion-dollar tech companies going public.

In venture capital, a “unicorn” is a startup company with a value of over $1 billion, and they’re going public at an unprecedented rate this year.

So what exactly makes unicorns so special? In the past, companies typically needed a much larger amount of resources to grow to a billion-dollar valuation. Going public was a way for companies to access new sources of funding. Today, however, companies can grow quickly with far fewer resources, leading to this year’s unicorn boom.

According to HowMuch.net, plant-based meat producer Beyond Meat is the best-performing unicorn of the year, followed by electronic signing software DocuSign, video communications company Zoom, cloud computing company PagerDuty and financial services company TradeWeb.

Meanwhile, the five worst-performing unicorns are Snap Inc., Lyft, Dropbox, Spotify and Slack.

Along with naming the top and bottom five, HowMuch.net took a look at 13 unicorns to determine what a $1,000 initial investment in each would be worth today.

A wise initial investment in the year’s top unicorn, Beyond Meat, would be worth $3,274 if you had invested when the company first went public back in May. The remaining unicorns fall considerably short of Beyond Meat’s valuation, with a $1,000 initial investment in the number-two company, DocuSign, worth $1,311, according to HowMuch.net’s calculations.

And what about the worst-performing companies? A 1,000 initial investment in Snap inc., the poorest performing unicorn, would only be worth $605, as of HowMuch.net’s June 25 report. According to the site, while some have pointed to these more disappointing performances as a sign that the unicorn bubble is bursting, the strong performance of the top companies suggests that betting wisely can still reap huge returns.

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