CNBC’s Jim Cramer on Friday harshly criticized the way investment bankers handled recent IPOs for companies like DoorDash and Airbnb, two tech companies that saw big pops in their stocks after starting trading this week.
“I don’t want to say the market is broken, but the process of how we do this business is definitely broken,” Cramer said on Squawk Box.
Food delivery app DoorDash closed its market debut on Wednesday by more than 85%, while apartment rental Airbnb ended its first day of trading on Thursday with a gain of more than 112%.
Those massive first-day moves that left so much money on the table are not the companies’ fault, Cramer said. Instead, he said it was “embarrassing” work by the financial firms working on the IPO. “You should focus on how to do it better.”
While big market debuts are great for shareholders, they’re not that great for companies. In this case, Airbnb, which could have raised more than double the money when it went public, valued shares at a price of $ 3.5 billion at $ 68 each. For DoorDash, the IPO price of $ 102 per share brought in $ 3.37 billion. Had the company valued shares where they closed on day one, that increase could have been more than $ 6 billion.
Cramer said the recent price action reminded him of the dotcom boom in 1999 when retail investors showed a similar interest in future public companies.
“This happened in 1999 when the consortium offices completely misjudged the public and the public is back and they are pricing deals as if the public isn’t back and it’s just the same old, same old funds buying stocks,” said the ” Mad Money “host said.
“This new cohort – and it’s not just Robinhood but the public too – has not been considered so everyone is blowing it up,” added Cramer, referring to the stock trading app preferred by younger investors.
On Wednesday, before DoorDash began trading, Cramer said he believed there was “rabid money” chasing tech companies, especially from younger investors who use their services frequently.
“I think there is money that basically says, ‘We don’t really care what the opening price is,'” Cramer said. “There won’t be a lot of discipline with a lot of these market buyers. They won’t set a price limit.”
According to JJ Kinahan, chief strategist at TD Ameritrade, there was a remarkable millennial interest in DoorDash and Airbnb in the early days of trading. In a “Squawk Box” interview Friday, Kinahan said that about 41% of DoorDash’s business on its broker’s platform came from millennial customers, compared with about 45% for Airbnb.