Are SPACs still appealing to investors and companies amid the current market?

I think SPACs are another tool in the tool chest. I think that any company that considers SPACs should obviously consider every other route to accessing the public markets, including a direct listing or a traditional IPO, or potentially even just staying private. There's still cheap access to private funding for most companies.

Just with the volume of SPAC deals that are happening, you're seeing what seems to be a saturation of new tech issuance into the public markets. We did an interesting analysis on IPO performance for tech companies this year, and while the blockbusters get a lot of attention in the aggregate, something like 50% trade below their original IPO issuance. If you add SPACs into that, it's far worse. I think that what you need to evaluate still is the fundamentals of business. You're adding on top of regular market risk technical risk when you're looking at SPAC investments.

I guess the summary there is: they’re valuable in that they add a tool to the toolkit. The sheer number of them seems to have saturated the public markets, and just like every other financial transaction, they need to be considered pretty carefully.