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If the main dig against traditional IPOs is that they are miss priced I don't see how SPACs fix that. Two SPAC offerings in recent memory that I'm aware of, Virgin Galactic, and Nikola both had huge run ups soon after the mergers happened. This dynamic seems more likely to be a product of hype and limited available shares initially due to lockup periods.

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But critically, the misprice is not what matters to the companies raising money. What matters to them is the amount of money they’re able to raise initially, and that can be higher in a SPAC deal. Or it could be lower! But it’s less volatile.

But from first principles, it should basically always be lower.

Yeah, but even if it's lower, the number is certain, decided on over the negotiating table. In an IPO, you don't know till the day of your IPO exactly how much you're going to raise.

When a company does an IPO, they hire an underwriter that guarantees that they'll sell a specific amount of stock at a specific price. So the company knows how much money they'll raise by the time the first day of trading arrives.

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