Been digging through some old 2018 IPO data and honestly, the results are wild. Some of these companies absolutely crushed it, while others... yeah, not so much. Thought I'd share what I found.

So back in 2018, there was a ton of hype around IPOs. Moderna, Spotify, Dropbox - all went public that year. If you'd thrown money at the right ones, you'd be sitting pretty. But pick the wrong ones and you're down big.

Let me break down a few that stuck with me. Moderna launched at $23 in December 2018 and hit nearly $450 at its peak in 2021. Even now it's trading way above that original IPO price - that's the kind of return that makes people remember an IPO forever. BJ's Wholesale Club went public at $17 and climbed to over $75. Those early investors made serious money.

Then there's the flip side. Spotify came in hot at $165.90 in April 2018, reached $364 in 2021, but then got absolutely hammered. Dropbox went public at $29 and never really recovered - it's been sitting below that price for years now. ADT and Cushman & Wakefield both dropped roughly 30-50% from their IPO prices. Even Domo, which had some solid business fundamentals, couldn't hold its gains.

What's interesting is that some of the 2018 IPO list companies that looked questionable at first actually turned out decent. Nio, the Chinese EV maker, went public at $6 and tripled from there. Americold, the warehouse real estate company, is still above its $16 IPO price despite the recent market volatility.

The lesson I'm taking away: timing matters, but so does picking the right sector. The cloud companies had massive tailwinds during the pandemic, but they've cooled off. Meanwhile, companies in different spaces like biotech and EVs showed more resilience. If you're looking back at that 2018 IPO list wishing you'd invested differently, well, most of these stocks are still trading. Some are undervalued if you believe in dollar-cost averaging into positions you missed.