Newsmax shares closed their first trading day up 735% on March 31, 2025 — the largest first-day IPO pop ever recorded, beating a 698% record that had stood since 1999.
A $10 share sold in a $75 million offering closed at $83.51 after multiple trading halts for volatility, handing Newsmax a market cap north of $7 billion despite the company being unprofitable with modest revenue. It's the eighth time in market history a stock has closed its debut session up at least 150%, and every prior record-holder eventually gave most of the gain back. Below is the full ranked list of the eight biggest first-day IPO pops on record, each sourced and dated, plus what happened to the stock after the confetti settled.
The Biggest IPO First-Day Pops of All Time
The record for the biggest IPO first-day pop of all time belongs to Newsmax, whose stock jumped 735% on its March 31, 2025 debut — driven mostly by retail investors buying into the conservative media company's ties to Donald Trump's second term. That surpassed VA Linux Systems' 698% pop from December 1999, which had itself broken theglobe.com's 606% record set in November 1998. All three shared a common trait: a tiny public float relative to overwhelming buy demand.
The Full Table: Every Pop, Sourced and Dated
| # | Company | IPO Date | Offer Price | Day-1 Close | Day-1 Gain |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Newsmax | Mar 31, 2025 | $10.00 | $83.51 | +735% |
| 2 | VA Linux Systems | Dec 9, 1999 | $30.00 | $239.25 | +698% |
| 3 | theglobe.com | Nov 13, 1998 | $9.00 | $63.50 | +606% |
| 4 | Foundry Networks | Sep 28, 1999 | n/a | n/a | +525% |
| 5 | Webmethods | Feb 11, 2000 | n/a | n/a | +507.5% |
| 6 | Akamai Technologies | Oct 29, 1999 | n/a | n/a | +458% |
| 7 | Sycamore Networks | Oct 22, 1999 | n/a | n/a | +386% |
| 8 | Circle Internet Group | Jun 5, 2025 | $31.00 | $83.23 | +168% |
Sources: Forbes and Bloomberg (Newsmax); CBS News and TheStreet (VA Linux); The Motley Fool and Wikipedia (theglobe.com); Ritholtz "The Big Picture" compilation of Renaissance Capital IPO data (Foundry Networks, Webmethods, Akamai, Sycamore Networks); Renaissance Capital (Circle). Offer price and close figures marked "n/a" are not independently re-verified beyond the percentage gain reported in the original coverage. All figures reflect first-day closing prices, not intraday highs.
Why Biggest IPO First-Day Pops Don't Predict Long-Term Winners
Every stock on this list except Akamai and Circle (both too recent to fully judge) either collapsed or dramatically underperformed within a few years of its record-setting debut. VA Linux fell from a $239.25 close to $1.19 by December 2002 — a decline of more than 99%. theglobe.com was bankrupt within two years. Sycamore Networks and Foundry Networks were both swept up in the 2001–2002 telecom-equipment collapse.
What the headline misses
A 735% or 698% headline number reads like a triumph, but it's mostly a measure of how badly the IPO was priced relative to demand — not a signal about the business. Newsmax sold shares at $10 into demand that would clear at $83.51 within hours; every dollar of that gap went to day-one flippers, not the company's balance sheet. By August 2026, Newsmax traded around $8.97 — below its original $10 offer price and roughly 89% off its first-day close. That's the more useful data point for anyone tempted to treat a record pop as evidence of a good company, rather than evidence of a mispriced, thinly floated stock meeting retail momentum.
Record-Setting Pop vs. Where the Stock Traded Later
Day-1 close: Forbes/Bloomberg (Newsmax), CBS News (VA Linux). Later price: stockanalysis.com (Newsmax, Aug 2026); contemporaneous market data (VA Linux, Dec 2002).
How We Ranked the Biggest IPO First-Day Pops of All Time
Ranking is by first-day closing price gain versus the IPO offer price — the standard measure used by Renaissance Capital, the IPO research firm whose data underpins most financial-media coverage of pop-day records, and cross-checked against contemporaneous reporting from Forbes, Bloomberg, CBS News, and Barry Ritholtz's compiled dot-com-era IPO data. We limited the list to companies with reasonably well-documented offer and close prices rather than intraday highs, which are frequently misreported as the "pop" figure. For context on how these listings fit the broader IPO cycle, see our 2026 tech IPO calendar and our tech IPO tracker.
Newsmax's 735% debut is the new record for the biggest IPO first-day pop of all time — and history says that record is a warning sign, not a bragging right.
Every prior record-holder on this list gave back most of its gain within a few years.
Originally published in the Trace Cohen newsletter at Value Add VC.
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