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Editor’s Note: There are 5 promising Initial Public Offerings in the pipeline. Most folks will wait until IPO day – and then race to buy shares at an inflated price.
My IPO Insiders Project shows how you can “front-run” the next major IPO. And claim a stake ahead of the public listing.
Here’s how to get started today.
Most IPO coverage is about the winners.
Yet the losers can also teach important lessons – and help you avoid costly losses.
Here are the five worst-performing IPOs of the year, measured from the IPO price to the October 2 close:
Advasa Holdings: -98.6%
Game Your Game: -92.6%
Green Circle Decarbonize: -90.0%
VenHub Global: -89.0%
Lakewood-Amedex Biotherapeutics: -88.3%
The first thing that jumps out: four of these five weren’t traditional IPOs.
They were direct listings.
The company sold no new shares and raised no money. The “IPO price” was a reference price, and existing shareholders are now able to sell their stock. Renaissance Capital counted 13 direct listings by early September, a record. They averaged a 71% loss from their first trade.
Lesson one: check the deal size. If it’s $0, the company isn’t raising any money. Investors who buy stock in the open market are giving insiders a chance to offload their stock.
Lesson two: Look at the income statement to see if there is actually any revenue. Every name here had a hot theme. Few had a business.
Game Your Game, an AI golf company, had about $46,000 in trailing revenue against a $4.7 million loss. VenHub, which builds robotic convenience stores, booked about $0.5 million in revenue against roughly $60 million in losses, and its auditors raised a going-concern warning. Four of the five had five or fewer employees.
Lesson three: count the shares waiting to be sold. Advasa registered about 94 million shares for resale. VenHub set up an equity line of up to $100 million. When supply keeps arriving and no institutions are buying, the price typically drops.
Lesson four: a big first day can be the worst entry. Game Your Game nearly doubled on day one and later hit $32.66. It closed Friday at $0.59. VenHub jumped 49% in its debut and traded near $40 before falling to $0.48.
Lesson five: a reverse split is a warning, not a fix. Green Circle, the only real underwritten IPO in the group at $10 million, does a 1-for-6 share consolidation on October 7 to lift its price for exchange rules. Lakewood-Amedex already did a 1-for-10 reverse split in June.
I’ve written before that small IPOs can deliver outsized gains. That’s still true. Tiny floats just move fast in both directions.
What separates the winners from this list is pretty simple: real revenue, real cash raised, and a share count that isn’t about to balloon.
So, what are the most promising IPOs for the final months of 2026?
Go here and I’ll share details on my top 5 names.
Ian Wyatt
Editor, IPO Watch