NYSE President Lynn Martin: January 2026 will be a busy IPO quarter, ETFs are the greatest financial innovation of our lifetimes
Dec 5, 2025 with Lynn Martin
Key Points
- NYSE President Lynn Martin expects January 2026 to see an unusually active IPO quarter as deals delayed by 2025 market disruptions clear, though midterm elections will compress the usable runway by shutting the market for weeks beforehand.
- Martin calls ETFs among the greatest financial innovations of her lifetime, citing their ability to provide daily pricing and transparency to illiquid asset classes like municipal bonds and crypto.
- The next frontier is wrapping private instruments in ETF structures, but prior closed-end vehicles holding private shares traded at three to four times NAV, exposing the structural pricing risk the ETF wrapper alone cannot solve.
Summary
Lynn Martin, president of the NYSE, says January 2026 is shaping up to be an unusually active IPO quarter. Several deals that were ready to price were pushed back by two separate market disruptions in 2025: Liberation Day, which shut the IPO window earlier in the year, and a government shutdown that caused further delays late in the calendar. That backlog is now clearing into Q1, and Martin says momentum is genuine because the narrative is already public and issuers are committed to moving early.
The window, however, has a built-in ceiling. The 2026 midterm elections will likely close the IPO market for at least a few weeks beforehand, as issuers avoid pricing into potential volatility. That dynamic compresses the usable runway for the year and puts additional weight on Q1 execution.
On ETFs, Martin is unambiguous: she considers them among the greatest financial innovations of her lifetime. The core argument is structural. ETFs provide daily mark-to-market pricing and end-of-day NAV for baskets of assets that are themselves deeply illiquid, a structural arbitrage that has proven particularly powerful in fixed income, where municipal bond ETFs have accumulated significant AUM, and in crypto, where ETF wrappers have materially expanded institutional access.
The next frontier under active discussion is wrapping private instruments in ETF structures. Vlad Tenev of Robinhood has publicly flagged that as a target opportunity. Martin acknowledges the logistics are unresolved, specifically around voting rights in underlying assets and disclosure requirements, but notes that the transparency ETFs impose, daily pricing and NAV, would be additive for asset classes that currently have almost none.
The caution flag on private-asset ETFs is already visible in prior experiments. Closed-end vehicles holding private shares have traded at three to four times NAV, meaning buyers paid a steep premium over the actual value of the underlying assets, a structurally poor entry point regardless of asset quality. The ETF wrapper does not automatically solve that pricing problem.