The wave of huge cash outs heats up sharply, and the US stock bull market faces liquidity and valuation pressures
Driven by the stabilization of U.S. stocks at high levels and the maintenance of high corporate valuations, the U.S. securities market has recently ushered in the largest wave of cashing out by shareholders and insiders in recent years. Analysts pointed out that record huge shareholding reductions and equity financing are continuing to absorb liquidity in the secondary market, causing investors to worry about market pressure and the unsustainability of the bull market. Data show that since the second quarter of this year, the amount of funds cashed out by major shareholders, private equity institutions and corporate executives of major U.S. listed companies through secondary public offerings (SPOs) and block transactions has soared, hitting a new high for the same period in recent years. Among them, the concentrated reduction of holdings in the technology, finance and consumer sectors is particularly significant. Major shareholders of many industry leading companies have successively completed the realization of hundreds of millions of dollars in shareholdings. Market analysis pointed out that the surge in this round of cash-out is mainly due to the intersection of multiple factors. On the one hand, as the major U.S. stock indexes have continued to fluctuate at high levels, corporate insiders and early-stage investment institutions have significantly increased their willingness to lock in profits; on the other hand, high capital costs and macroeconomic uncertainty have also prompted various institutional investors to speed up capital gathering and asset portfolio optimization. Industry experts emphasize that the concentrated release of large-scale equity supply directly creates a squeezing effect on secondary market funds. If there is insufficient new capital to take over, such large-scale cash-outs will not only put direct downward pressure on the stock prices of relevant stocks, but may also gradually erode the overall valuation support of the market, thereby posing a severe test to the stability of the current bull market in U.S. stocks.