Nas­daq cel­e­brates epic biotech IPO suc­cess in 2018. But can the par­ty on Wall Street rum­ba on?

On Thurs­day night Mod­er­na $MR­NA proved that a uni­corn can still raise record sums with a biotech IPO on Nas­daq. And by the time the mar­ket closed Fri­day, the 20% drop in their share price al­so had more than a few peo­ple won­der­ing if the par­ty on Wall Street was fi­nal­ly wind­ing down.

One way or the oth­er, though, 2018 has pro­vid­ed a record boun­ty of IPO cash for biotech. Nas­daq crunched the num­bers year-to-date, and con­clud­ed that Mod­er­na — along with two oth­er uni­corn list­ings for Al­lo­gene and Ru­bius that at­tract­ed huge sums this year along with 66 much-small­er out­fits — had raised $8.2 bil­lion for the new class of pub­lic com­pa­nies.

That sum even broke through the $6.5 bil­lion in cash raised dur­ing the go-go days of 2014, when the long IPO draught trig­gered by the 2008 cri­sis fi­nal­ly end­ed in a del­uge of 81 new list­ings. Back in 2014, though, a big group of 43% of those IPOs had to price be­low their range, with 57% in the range or high­er. So far this year, that suc­cess rate is a far more bull­ish 83%.

Here are the fig­ures:

Sign up to read this article for free.

Get free access to a limited number of articles, plus choose newsletters to get straight to your inbox.

SIGN UP LOG IN BECOME A PREMIUM SUBSCRIBER