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Surge in Chinese listings drives boom for US small-cap IPO market

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Surge in Chinese listings drives boom for US small-cap IPO market

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The volatile market for small US initial public offerings is “booming” thanks to a surge of Chinese listings on New York’s Nasdaq as companies race to beat a rule change that blocks the smallest deals.

The surge in listings kicked off late last year with 42 small offerings in the last three months of 2024, followed by 41 in the first quarter of this year — the two busiest quarters in records back 15 years, according to equity capital markets group Capital Markets Gateway (CMG). This was up from 20 in the second quarter of 2024 and 29 in the third.

Fifty-three of the past two quarter’s listings were from China and Hong Kong, with only 18 from the US, and all but nine on Nasdaq. CMG’s data excludes special purpose acquisition vehicles, which raise money in order to take over a private business.

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“The microcap IPO market is booming,” said Matthew Kennedy, a senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, citing small Chinese companies in sectors from pharmaceuticals to construction. “It’s a highly speculative area,” he said, with many investors losing out because most of the stocks eventually fall far below their initial offer price.

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The IPOs came ahead of a raft of policy changes enacted by Nasdaq, effective as of April 11, which include requiring companies listing on its lowest rung under certain standards to raise at least $15mn. The Securities and Exchange Commission said Nasdaq’s new rules would “promote fair and orderly markets” and “protect investors and the public interest”.

Daniel McClory, head of equity capital markets and China at US underwriter Boustead Securities, said he had “30 IPOs in process right now and more than a third are for [companies in] south-east Asia and Greater China”.

The market for large-cap listings has meanwhile disappointed hopes of a revival under Donald Trump. Waves of market volatility around the president’s tariff announcements led bankers to postpone several hotly anticipated tech IPOs while other large listings received a cool reception.

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This has not stopped a flurry of sub-$50mn deals since tariffs shook markets in April. Small IPOs have continued despite Nasdaq raising the bar last month — with eight further deals since the rule change.

“Explosive returns” from companies such as Hong Kong-based Diginex, an ESG data group, and Chinese group EPWK Holdings, a crowdsourcing platform, “can fuel interest from traders hoping for quick gains”, said Kennedy.

Line chart of Share price, $ showing Shares in EPWK surged in late April but collapsed in early May

Shares in Diginex have climbed 1,375 per cent since it listed in January. Last Tuesday, it said UAE royal Sheikh Mohammed bin Sultan bin Hamdan Al Nahyan had struck a $300mn deal giving him the right to buy 6.75mn of its shares before the end of the year.

EPWK had risen 470 per cent in the months after its February market debut, but plunged 75 per cent last Monday.

The market for these small offerings is dominated by amateur traders, who are often more willing to jump on perceived bargains in the stock market during times of disruption when big money managers stay away.

The US Financial Industry Regulatory Authority in 2023 warned investors about “unusual price increases on the day of or shortly after the IPOs of certain small-cap issuers, most of which involve issuers with operations outside the US” and “IPOs raising less than $25mn”.

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The average value of money raised in the small IPOs tracked by CMG in the six months to March was around $9mn.

Brokers say there could be more small IPOs if market conditions improve. “If the market settled down and co-operated we could do an IPO a week,” McClory said. “As it is, we’re targeting about one a month.”

The two most prolific underwriters in the space — Dominari Securities and RF Lafferty — have each taken seven companies public this year, including Chinese “machine vision” company Lianhe Sowell and Hong Kong hotpot chain MasterBeef.

RF Lafferty is headquartered in the Trump Building in New York’s Financial District. Dominari Securities, which acted as lead underwriter for Diginex’s IPO, is a subsidiary of Dominari Holdings, a fintech group based about four miles north in Trump Tower. 

Shares in Dominari Holdings rose 580 per cent in the six weeks before a February 11 filing revealing that the president’s sons Donald Trump Jr and Eric Trump had joined its advisory board, the Financial Times reported last month.

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Dominari and RF Lafferty did not respond to requests for comment.

The rush of smaller Chinese IPOs comes as concerns swirl among some investors over whether Trump will delist some Chinese stocks from US exchanges amid trade tensions with Beijing.

One banker at a small US broker said some Chinese companies listing in the US recently had “inverted their corporate structure” to obscure where they carry out the bulk of their business. He said that Chinese companies with an overseas subsidiary were converting their operating company into the parent company “to sanitise the Chinese nature of the listing”.

A bar chart of counts of microcap IPOs by country of headquarters, 2023-25

McClory said he expected that any Trump ban would probably target large state-owned enterprises and sensitive industries rather than small companies. He dismissed concerns that Chinese IPOs in the US were taking investment dollars that would otherwise benefit US entrepreneurs.

“Virtually all of these Asian IPOs were full of investors from Greater China, or Chinese-American investors in the US and outside of China,” he said. “It’s not like they come to the US and take money from American widows and orphans.”

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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

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Supreme Court financial disclosures reveal how their books add to their income

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett speaks at the Reagan Library on Sept. 9, 2025, in Simi Valley, Calif. Barrett discussed and signed copies of her new book, Listening to the Law: Reflections on the Court and Constitution.

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Even as the Supreme Court was handing down one legal thunderbolt after another last week, the justices were quietly releasing their annual financial reports. Justice Samuel Alito was the only sitting justice to request an extension, which he has done for 15 years. The disclosures do not give a complete account of the justices’ total income and wealth, but they give insights into their concertgoing, guest professorships and even their involvement in youth sports.

In addition to their salaries, much of the justices’ reported income came from their book deals. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson led the pack earning more than $1.1 million last year for a total of roughly $4 million since her memoir, Lovely One, was published in 2024.

Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and retired Justice Anthony Kennedy also reported income from published books. Earnings from their books ranged from $849,000 for Barrett, to $300,000 for Gorsuch and $88,000 for Sotomayor, whose books include her 2013 autobiography and five children’s books. Justice Clarence Thomas, who previously earned $1.5 million for his 2007 memoir, listed no publisher payments last year, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh, one of 13 co-authors of a 2016 legal treatise, also received no payments last year. Kavanaugh is said to be working on a memoir but he listed no payments for the anticipated book. Alito does have a book coming out in the fall, but with his financial report still outstanding, there is no data on how much he was paid for the work in 2025.

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The only two sitting justices who have not written books are Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan.

Many justices also earned income from teaching at law schools. Roberts reported income from New England Law, located in Boston, and Gorsuch reported teaching income from George Mason University in Virginia. Thomas taught classes at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., and Barrett and Kavanaugh taught at Notre Dame Law School. Barrett graduated from the school and began teaching there 23 years ago; Kavanaugh has family connections to Notre Dame.

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

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Manhattan Building’s Columns Buckled Beneath New Addition, Images Show

At least two structural columns buckled and failed in a 37-story office tower in Midtown Manhattan on Tuesday, prompting evacuations of nearby streets and buildings. While city officials asserted that the tower was in no danger of collapsing completely, outside engineers said further failures in the structure could not be ruled out.

A pair of columns that failed completely were part of the tower’s existing structure. A New York Times review of images and videos from inside the building has found that several floors were added atop these columns.

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City officials said in a news conference on Tuesday that the building was continuing to move, while they simultaneously assured the city that the building would not suffer “total collapse.” “The way this building is constructed, it’s a steel-frame building,” John Esposito, a chief in the Fire Department in New York, said at the afternoon news conference. “So, it would not be a total collapse. It would be more of a localized collapse.” Still, he said, “that remains our concern, that it’s moved.”

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Engineers said that the movement itself was cause for concern. In a properly designed steel building, they said, loads should redistribute quickly to surviving structural supports if columns failed.

Joe DiPompeo, a former president of the Structural Engineering Institute at the American Society of Civil Engineers, said that if the structure had been overloaded, he would expect any movement “to happen very quickly,” rather than gradually.

“Generally when a column buckles, it’s a sudden failure,” Mr. DiPompeo said. He said that a full collapse remained unlikely given the redundancies built into the building codes.

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Engineers often refer to the most dangerous possibility as a progressive collapse, a process in which structures near the initial failure become overstressed and also fail, potentially bringing down the building if the sequence continues. While unlikely, it cannot be ruled out, Mr. DiPompeo said.

Footage recorded from inside the building shows at least two structural columns appear to have failed completely, Mr. DiPompeo said. Other nonstructural, interior walls — or at least the metal “studs” that were in place to hold them up — also appear to have deformed.

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“The only way that really happens is if the floor above them dropped. It looks like the floor above could have dropped a foot or two, which is obviously not a good situation,” Mr. DiPompeo said.

@fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @fernando40tiktok.commarc via Storyful

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Image from @Bogs4NY via X

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The 37-story building is in the process of being converted from office space into residential units. Four new floors and a large vertical portion were added onto the existing building in recent months. The vertical portion consists of a stack of over a dozen new floors cantilevered out over the existing building below.

Engineers said that there was nothing inherently wrong with adding residential floors or the cantilevered section above the columns that failed, as long as the original structure and the modifications had properly accounted for the added weight and wind loads.

“The cantilever alone doesn’t change anything,” Mr. DiPompeo said, but it does put additional load on the columns underneath — a factor that should have been reflected in the design.

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Nathan Berman, managing principal and founder of MetroLoft, the developer overseeing the conversion, said on Tuesday that “this incident is nothing more than a typical construction mishap.”

He said two columns near the northwest corner of the tower had bent under the weight of additions to the building above, most likely because those columns had not been properly reinforced, though he said an investigation would determine the cause. The rest of the columns, he said, “picked up the weight.” He estimated the affected floors above the failed columns had sagged by a maximum of four inches.

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Mr. Berman said that he expected the problems to be fixed and the project to be completed with, at most, a slight delay.

On Tuesday evening, installation of temporary shoring was set to begin shortly, in order to help stabilize the 20th and 21st floors of the building.

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DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

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DOJ warns of criminal charges for state election officials if noncitizens vote

The Justice Department sent letters warning election officials in all 50 states and the District of Columbia that they could face criminal prosecution over noncitizen voting, a spokesperson for the Justice Department confirmed Tuesday.

The letters, signed by Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who heads up the department’s Civil Rights Division, give states five days to explain how they will comply with federal voter eligibility laws and how they will maintain “clean voter lists.”

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“The Department sent these letters to all 50 states and the District of Columbia, asking for voluntary compliance in a timely manner with their obligations under federal law to ensure only citizens vote in federal elections,” a Justice Department spokesperson said in a statement.

Noncitizen voting in federal elections is extremely rare, but Trump and his administration have falsely portrayed it as a widespread issue.

Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar and Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson are among those who said they received the letters from the Justice Department.

The letters say state election officers “could be criminally prosecuted for aiding and abetting” noncitizen voting. They further specify that any election officer who knowingly retains noncitizens on a statewide voting registration list or who facilitates noncitizens’ receiving and casting ballots could be subject to criminal liability.

“An intentional act that is aimed at diluting the votes of citizens could also constitute a violation” of federal law, the letters said.

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Henderson wrote on social media that the threats constitute “truly bizarre behavior.”

“Got another love letter this morning from the DOJ sprinkled throughout with threats of criminal prosecution,” she wrote. “I’m sure I’m not the only chief election officer of a state who is being targeted for following state and federal laws by resisting DOJ’s demands for private voter data that have thus far been ruled illegal by at least a dozen courts.”

The letters are the latest move in the Justice Department’s campaign to assert more federal control over state elections.

While some states have complied with the administration’s demands that they hand over voter roll data, the Justice Department has sued 30 states and Washington, D.C., for resisting. So far, 11 different federal courts have dismissed the Justice Department’s efforts to seize voter rolls.

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