Sherwood News

Chinese IPOs in the US have been making a comeback... of sorts

Even with ~$6 billion tea giant Chagee now in the mix, the current landscape still seems to be deterring bigger names.

4/23/25 9:38AM

Strange as the timing may seem, given the broader geopolitical picture, many Chinese companies are seeing 2025 as the year to hit the US public market. Last week, tea giant Chagee soared 21% on its Nasdaq debut to hit a $6.2 billion valuation, while a flurry of tech firms are reportedly looking to follow suit, per Bloomberg.

Red wave

Chagee’s $411 million raise last Thursday made it the largest Chinese consumer company listing in the US since 2021, momentarily bucking the drought of big Chinese initial public offerings that had been attributed to deteriorating relations between the two nations. Still, even against the backdrop of President Trump’s ongoing tariffs, postponed IPOs from other companies, and talk of Chinese stocks being delisted from US exchanges, 2025 has largely picked up where last year left off in terms of enticing companies looking to list in the US.

There was once a time when Chinese tech companies deciding to go public in America would shake Wall Street, like e-commerce behemoth Alibaba’s IPO in 2014, which initially raised $21.8 billion and was later valued at $25 billion, making it the largest in history at the time. While a host of companies followed suit, the surge wasn’t to last: after Chinese ride-hailing company DiDi Global decided to go public on the NYSE in 2021 — despite not getting the green light from Beijing regulators — it was forced to delist by the Chinese government, complicating the listing process ever since.

The tide has been slowly shifting recently, with Chinese offerings on the US market up almost 47% in 2024 compared to the year before, per data from US-China Economic and Security Review Commission (USCC). However, the precarious regulatory landscape was clearly a hurdle that many bigger companies were wary of even before the latest tariffs, with the 37 offerings in 2024 worth just $1.9 billion, down from $10.7 billion just four years earlier.

Interestingly, there had already been 11 offerings from companies based in Shanghai, Beijing, and beyond by March 7 this year, according to the USCC, as China’s government continues to boost and protect its domestic businesses.

Tasha Matsumoto

18h

Tech drags down stocks; gold and silver plummet

Gold and silver sank amid Trump’s plans to nominate reputed inflation hawk Kevin Warsh as the next Fed chair.

Public sculptures along the Clear Creek Trail in downtown Golden, Colorado.

Ben Walsh, Luke Kawa19h

Gold and silver plunge, suffering their worst losses since the 1980s

Gold and silver suffered their worst losses in decades on Friday, with the iShares Silver Trust falling more than 30% at one point during afternoon trading before recovering slightly.

After recently crossing $5,000 per ounce for the first time, gold’s dip was relatively muted compared to silver’s rout, but nevertheless eye-watering for a traditional safe haven asset. At one point, gold’s intraday dip exceeded 10%, its worst intraday drop since the 1980s and surpassing its declines seen during the 2008 financial crisis, per Bloomberg.

Silver’s drop was its worst in percentage terms since 1980.

Gold, and particularly silver, have been pushed higher recently by a storm of retail trader enthusiasm for the metals, as well as more traditional drivers of precious metals such as geopolitical risks and concerns over a fall in the dollar’s value due to trade wars and possibly waning central bank independence.

Leveraged ETFs that hold gold and silver futures have become increasingly popular trading vehicles amid the parabolic moves in precious metals prices, and likely contributed to the magnitude of the unwind today.

Case in point: look at silver futures for delivery in March. That’s the dominant contract held by the ProShares Ultra Silver ETF, which offers exposure to 2x the daily move in the shiny metal. Volumes exploded (and the contract rebounded modestly) right around 1:25 p.m. ET, which is when silver futures settled and around the time the ETF performed its daily rebalancing (which in this case, involved massive selling).

Max Knoblauch23h

Gaming stocks plunge following release of Google’s AI tool that can create playable, copyrighted worlds

Shares of major gaming companies are plunging on Friday as investors get a deeper look at the capabilities of Google’s new generative-AI prototype, Project Genie.

The tool allows users to “create and explore infinitely diverse worlds” with a text or image prompt. Users have already exposed its ability to realistically recreate knockoffs of copyrighted games from Nintendo and other gaming companies.

As users experiment with recreations of game worlds like Take-Two’s “Grand Theft Auto 6,” shares of major gaming companies are sinking. Unity Software, the maker of the popular Unity game engine, is down over 25%, while gaming platform Roblox is down about 9%.

D-Wave Quantum CEO on what’s next after the most eventful month in the company’s history

“If 2025 was the international year of quantum, 2026 is the international year of D-Wave Quantum,” said CEO Dr. Alan Baratz.

Luke Kawa24h

Matt Phillips1/30/26

SoFi bests Wall Street’s Q4 expectations, shares rise

SoFi Technologies reported better-than-expected Q4 sales and earnings-per-share numbers Friday before market open, sending the shares higher in the premarket.

The online lender reported:

Adjusted Q4 earnings per share of $0.13 vs. the $0.12 consensus estimate collected by FactSet.
Adjusted revenue of $1.01 billion in Q4 vs. the Wall Street forecast for $977.4 million.
Q1 2026 adjusted net revenue guidance of approximately $1.04 billion vs. the $1.04 billion consensus expectation, according to FactSet.

SoFi shares rallied roughly 70% last year, as the company’s growing menu of financial products — including trading, wealth management, mortgages, credit cards, and cryptocurrency trading — showed signs of gaining traction beyond its traditional base of student borrowers. But the stock has stumbled in early 2026, falling nearly 7% in January through Thursday’s close, though most of that slump seems to have been reversed this morning.