The Globe and Mail reports in its Saturday edition that when Reddit went public March 21, it felt for a moment like 2021 all over again, when unprofitable growth companies with inflated valuations went public to great acclaim on a weekly basis. The Globe's Tim Shufelt writes that the IPO market has been graveyard quiet for two years now; the Toronto Stock Exchange has not had a single initial public offering in more than a year. This is supposed to be a bull market, maybe even a stock bubble. A couple of forces are behind the dry spell. The first is that more and more companies are taking a pass on going public, in favour of private sources of financing. The second is more of a temporary backlash to the pandemic IPO binge. In 2021, IPOs on major U.S. exchanges raised nearly $120-billion -- a quadrupling over prepandemic norms. The market's appetite for IPOs was ravenous. The average IPO gained more than 30 per cent in its first day of trading in 2021. The performance of those stocks ever since then has generally been horrendous. A wave of Canadian companies went public in 2021, most of which are trading at steep losses. Telus International raised $1.4-billion in early 2021. Its shares are down by 66 per cent since then.