‘Success of big ticket IPOs could mean market peak is near’

SpaceX raised a record-breaking $75 billion through its IPO last week, and two more mega IPOs—OpenAI and Anthropic—are expected soon. Successful closure of all these three offers could mean it’s the global market’s top in the current bull phase, and a major slide could soon follow, one of the world’s leading fund managers has warned.“It is worth noting that Goldman Sachs went public just before the 2000 bear market. Blackstone went public just before the 2008 crisis,” Yves Bonzon, group chief investment officer (CIO), Julius Baer, the Zurich-headquartered global private banking and wealth management major, told TOI recently.

Now Dow Jones, Nasdaq Composite and S&, all are in record territories. SpaceX is already listed with a market cap of about $2 trillion and OpenAI and Anthropic are looking for valuations in the range of $1 trillion to $2 trillion each.“My best guess is that when (all) these companies successfully complete their IPOs, we will be in the vicinity of a major market top. There is simply too much money at stake now,” Bonzon said.As group CIO at Julius Baer, Bonzon manages assets worth $625 billion, translating to about Rs 59.6 lakh crore. In addition, the discretionary and Julius Baer in-house fund assets, managed by the CIO office, is over $100 billion, translating to about Rs 9.5 lakh crore.

Speaking about Julius Baer’s rationale for India as an investment destination, Bonzon said that the Swiss money manager had started buying Indian stocks again in July 2025 and the strategy worked till the West Asia war started in late Feb.“We entered the allocation in June of last year. The timing appeared favourable, and it seemed to be working out well through Jan and Feb, until the conflict in (West Asia) introduced additional oil price risk.”

He believes if crude oil settles back into the $70-per-barrel range, India, along with China could be at the top of the list of re-rating candidates. “Unless there is a fundamental change in govt policy direction.

..we are unlikely to trade in and out of this allocation. Once we have a position, we hold it strategically,” Bonzon said.Talking about India’s position in Julius Baer’s scheme of things, Bonzon said India was a very important market for the Swiss firm.

“Asia is our second home market, with the same strategic importance as Switzerland. India is a strategic growth market for Julius Baer, and we have the advantage of an onshore presence, and the brand is well recognised among our target audience in the country.”What makes Julius Baer truly distinctive is that it is the only global wealth manager of scale, outside of the US, that has neither an asset management operation nor an investment banking division, Bonzon said. “That is a genuinely unique positioning, particularly in the ultra-high-net-worth segment, where the number of institutions clients will do business with is limited.”