Remember the "retail vs. Wall Street" battle three years ago? Tens of thousands of retail investors banded together on social networks to buy a number of stocks that had been shorted by Wall Street's institutional investors, causing stocks to soar and institutions to suffer heavy losses. One of the earliest places for these retail investors was Reddit, a social media site.

On January 29, Bloomberg reported that Reddit could go public as soon as March. Reddit has been holding meetings with potential IPO investors, and advisers have recommended that the company target a valuation of about $5 billion, a far cry from the $10 billion previously reported. It is reported that potential buyers on Rainmaker Securities, a private market securities trading platform, have offered between $4.5 billion and $4.8 billion, and the equity trading platform Forge Global Holdings database indicates a valuation of $4.8 billion.

Reddit is one of the most popular social media platforms in the United States, competing with Quora, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok and X (formerly Twitter), among others. In 2005, Reddit was co-founded by University of Virginia students Steve Hoffman, Alexis Ohanian and Aaron Swartz, before being sold to media conglomerate Conde Nast for $10 million.

In the past decade, Reddit has gradually become the most popular forum social media in the United States, and many retail investors like to gather on Reddit's major forums to talk about investment experiences, among which the most prominent is "WallStreetBets". The WallStreetBets forum gathered a large number of retail Internet users that WallStreet had ignored until the high-profile battle to force a void.

Due to the large number of retail investors under the "WallStreetBets" forum, and very united, in early 2021, retail investors gathered on the Reddit forum to compete with WallStreet institutions represented by the well-known hedge fund Melvin Capital: retail investors frantically bought stocks that were shorted by institutional investors, triggering a WallStreet short-selling war. Reddit has also become popular at home and abroad, with millions of new users, and the name "retail base camp of the US stock market" has been completely launched.

After the battle, Reddit secured several funding rounds and first filed to go public in December 2021, when it was expected to raise $700 million to expand. In January 2022, the company invited Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs to help with the IPO process, which was once valued at $15 billion.

But Reddit's subsequent road to the public market has not been smooth. The valuation and timing of a company's listing have a great relationship with its current market environment, 2021 is the hot time of the US stock market, and by 2022, with the pace of the Federal Reserve's interest rate hike, the hot money in the market has shrunk rapidly, and the IPO market has declined.

Today, people are looking forward to a gradual thaw in the U.S. IPO market in 2024, and Reddit has become one of the most anticipated ipos in 2024. Reddit currently makes most of its money from advertising, and like all social media, it faces stiff competition in the marketplace, which would be boosted by a successful IPO. Based on current progress, Reddit plans to publicly file documents in late February, start a roadshow in early March, and complete the IPO by the end of March.

It's worth noting that the last time a social media company went public in the U.S. was in 2019, when interactive media and services company Pinterest was valued at $10 billion. Some point out that given the difficult IPO market in recent years, Reddit may delay its plans again.