The amount of money raised by Canadian companies through stock sales overshadowed the total for the first six months of the year. Led by a blockbuster $4.6 billion bought deal from Enbridge Inc., financings from Peyto Exploration & Development Corp. PEY-T, Intact Financial Corp. IFC-T, DRI Healthcare Trust DHT-UN-T and a half-dozen other companies pushed the total for the first full week of September past $5.5 billion.
The $5.4 billion raised from Canadian stock sales from early January to the end of June is equivalent to the $5.9billion raised by the Canadian stock market.
The flurry of post-Labour Day activity alone is not what has Bay Street dealmakers optimistic that the recent deluge of deals will translate into a sustained downpour. Companies working on deals through the summer often wait until Labor Day to launch them.
That most of the post-Labour Day deals were fully oversubscribed - meaning investor demand to buy all those new shares significantly outstripped expectations - has bankers buying umbrellas. The deal was originally supposed to be $4.4 billion, but it was added three days after the financing was launched to accommodate the more robust investor demand.
When Peyto and Intact bought deals worth $125-million and $500-million, the same thing happened to Peyto and Intact. Peyto sold another $50-million worth of shares, and Intact upped its own deal by $75-million.
Debt markets, though never as diminishing as equity markets, have also come back to life, Babbar, the global co-head of equity capital markets for RBC Capital Markets, said.
BLX-T secured a $608-million loan from a syndicate of banks led by Desjardins Group to build the Apuiat wind farm on Quebec's North Shore.
After a fairly slow 18 months, issuance levels are getting back to more normalized levels, Swan said when the value of new stock sales plummeted to lows not seen since the 1990s. With the number of issuances falling, Rob Peterman warns that a rebound will likely take longer to materialize than many investors might expect.
Peterman, the vice-president of global business development for Toronto Stock Exchange owner TMX Group Inc., said in an interview. s a utterly moribund market for initial public offerings. In a study last month, researchers at the Bank of Nova Scotia identified glimmers of hope that the companies that rushed to public market during the boom of 2021 had massively underperformed the broader market.
Those glimmers grew as British chip maker Arm Holdings Ltd. jumped nearly 25 percent in its Nasdaq debut on Thursday. The next day, the food delivery company Instacart hiked the price range of its upcoming IPO, according to a regulatory filing.
The following high-profile companies, including data provider Klaviyo Inc. and famous German sandal maker Birkenstock Holding Ltd., also have IPOs scheduled to launch this month in the United States.
It's probably too late to be overly hopeful that Canadian markets will roar back into a more normal range, Peterman said, but we should be optimistic about the capital raising that is happening now suggesting 2024 will be off to a better start.