The NASDAQ CEO, Adena Friedman, discusses IPO market in 2022

Adena Friedman, NASDAQ CEO, attended The Claman CountdownClaman Countdown to discuss the status of the IPO market and what investors can anticipate after an extremely volatile year in 2022.

Friedman said that investor demand struggled in 2022 because of the soup of macro-issues that severely eroded their ability to determine a company's future.

Over the last year, I'm with investors and they've had to deal with a rising interest rate environment, rising inflationary environment, geopolitical unrest and frankly, the recovery from the Pandemic. The fiscal stimulus is not as strong, you know. It's really hard for them to sit down and model the future of a company, because they're dealing with a soup of macro issues, which makes it really hard for them to sit down and model the future of a company, Friedman explained on Wednesday.

Friedman believes that it is important to understand before investing because of the stunning differences between the IPO markets from 2021 to 2022.

There are about 200 companies on file to go public on NASDAQ. As we look at the pipeline of supply, it's a really strong pipeline of companies that want to tap the public markets. "You need to have demand," said the chair of the NASDAQ.

There is more uncertainty and concern associated with pulling their IPO due to the lack of demand from nervous investors, according to Claman.

Friedman urged investors to understand the cost of capital, the potential growth of the business, and the inflationary environment that the company is going to operate in before investing in order to achieve optimal results.

In 2022 all of these factors were unknown, making it very difficult to gauge the prosperity of a company.

I feel that it's likely that more of those unknowns will become known. We'll see where the interest rates go. The NASDAQ president said that the situation was at least more known now, and the pandemic is further behind us.

I think that it will give investors more of an ability to figure out how they underwrite deals. Friedman concluded that we're hoping that we'll see more vibrant IPO environment in the second half of the year.