Last week, an electric-vehicle maker that had delivered just 156 trucks went public in an initial offering that made it more valuable than Ford Motor Co. The week before, a money-losing sneaker company was worth nearly $4 billion at the end of its first day of public trading.
IPOs have broken record after record this year. So far, more than 900 companies have gone public, raising nearly $300 billion. Quietly, the market for publicly traded companies also did something it hadn’t done in years: It got bigger.
