Uber Technologies is set to kick off one of the most ballyhooed offerings of public stock in years, but at least one exchange pro thinks that this isn’t an ideal time to float shares.
Thomas Farley, the former president of the New York Stock Exchange, told CNBC Friday morning that this is a “very lousy day to IPO,” pointing to a week for the Dow Jones Industrial Average DJIA, -1.28% the Nasdaq Composite Index COMP, -1.87% and the S&P 500 index SPX, -1.45% that is set for the worst weekly skid of 2019.
Farley’s comments are likely not a surprise, given that all of the major stock indexes were down by at least 1% Friday morning and have been battered all week.
Read: Here’s how the Uber IPO stacks up among the biggest of all time
The downturn for markets comes in the wake of a nearly relentless rise for those same equity gauges over the past five months, which took the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq to records as recently as last Friday.
Read more: 5 things you need to know about the Uber IPO
However, heightened tariff tensions between China and the Trump administration have unraveled the recent updraft, giving bullish investors reasons, perhaps, to take some of their winnings off the table until more clarity on Sino-American trade relations are achieved.
Against that backdrop, Farley believes that Uber UBER, -6.02% executives and its cadre of Wall Street bankers likely considered their alternatives to making their debut on Friday. He says they should have gone public sooner.
See also: Lyft stops providing key data after IPO, then insults investors’ intelligence
Late Thursday, Uber said it would raise more than $8 billion in its IPO on the NYSE, making the ride-hailing giant the biggest public listing for a U.S.-based company since Facebook Inc. FB, -2.00% went public in 2012. Uber is slated to sell 180 million shares at $45 a share, with the company’s underwriters, led by Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Merrill Lynch, trying to create an offering book for Uber, with indications coming in at a range of $42-$43 below the company’s pricing, according to reports.
Uber’s offerings come amid a parade of high-profile companies that have gone public in recent months, including rival ride-hailing company Lyft Inc. LYFT, -6.02% Shares of Lyft, which have floundered after the company’s IPO, were down more than 8% on Friday.
Separately, Roger McNamee, co-founder of Elevations Partners LP and an early investor in Facebook, also joined the chorus of executives weighing in on the stock offering.
“This deal is not going well,” McNamee told CNBC, as the IPO was being priced for its opening trade. “We’re looking at a potential train wreck here,” he said.
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