Twist Bioscience Defies Skeptics With Strong Growth

If we don’t revisit history, we’re doomed to repeat it. Somebody somewhat famous said something like that at some point. If nothing else, taking a look back at one of the biggest bonehead periods of retail investment history offers an excellent intro for today’s article. In this case, we’re talking about special purpose acquisition companies (SPACs). Most of us will recall the meteoric rise and fall of these blank-check companies that over-promised and undelivered. While we sounded the alarm early in 2020 about the financially irresponsible nature of these backdoor deals to the public markets, investors had to lose billions before the SPAC craze finally went off the rails by 2022. 

Even academics could agree on this: A study published in 2024 analyzed 96 SPACs against a similar cohort of companies that IPO’d in traditional fashion. The researcher found that the former significantly lagged behind the latter in operating and financial performance. For instance, SPACs suffered a -16.6% median one-year return versus a +9.5% for traditional IPOs. The very different trajectories