Golf Startup Surges 600% And Becomes The Year's Biggest IPO

For a startup company, there aren't too many things more exciting than progressing to the point where it can make an initial public offering (IPO). 

But seeing the shares surge over 600% in the first day of trading and having the biggest IPO of 2023 might match that excitement. That's what happened to golf club maker Sacks-Parente Golf Inc., which blew the roof off of Wall Street with its August IPO.

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Sacks-Parente Golf manufactures high-end golf-putters with proprietary technology that the company says helps golfers hole more putts. Sacks-Parente designed its putters with special weighting and other features it claims allows golfers to keep their putts on line longer, which translates to lower scores. The price point for the Sacks-Parente putters is around $400, which is on par with products from well-known manufacturers like Scotty Cameron and Odyssey. 

Sacks-Parente shares opened the day's trading by offering 3.2 million shares at $4 per share. By the end of the day's trading, the share price had rocketed to $29. That's a 624% jump in share value that came on a rollicking day where Sacks-Parente trading was suspended 19 different times because of excessive volatility. 

Even against that backdrop, the IPO made a lot of money for early buyers, but the real winners were the original investors who invested at the pre-IPO stage when shares may have been available for pennies on the dollar. The success of the Sacks-Parente Golf IPO is a perfect example of why so many venture capitalists and VC funds are so active in the startup sector. The risk is high, but the rewards are absolutely incredible when your proverbial ship comes in.

It's rare that a blue-chip stock makes a 600% gain in one day, and even if it did, the share price was likely too high for most everyday investors to afford to begin with. By contrast, investors can get active in the startup market through equity crowdfunding platforms and build an entire portfolio of high-upside investment offerings for pennies. Thanks to the Jumpstart Our Businesses and Startups (JOBS) Act, opportunities like Sacks-Parente are now available to nonaccredited investors. 

There is considerable risk with startup investing. But the low buy-in price on many offerings and the plethora of equity crowdfunding platforms means everyday investors have access to offerings that would never have been available to them 15 years ago.

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