Stocks were down broadly Monday and for some of the newest public companies in Oregon, the news was especially bad.
Vacation rental operator Vacasa (Nasdaq: VCSA) and long-duration energy storage startup ESS (NYSE: GWH) hit new all-time lows during the trading day, and finished at their lowest closing prices.
Vacasa closed at $2.59, down 11.3% on the day, after sinking to $2.54 earlier. ESS closed at $2.97, down 8.3%. It hit a nadir of $2.93 at one point Monday.
Both stocks had gone public last year in mergers with special purpose acquisition companies, or SPACs, and began their trading lives around $10. And both are now around 70% below their opening prices.
A few other recently minted local publics fared a bit better on Monday.
Biotech firm Absci (Nasdaq: ABSI) hit an all-time low of $2.92 in early trading but bounced back to close at $3.16, up about 1% on the day. Still, it was 80% off its IPO price of $16.
NuScale Power (NYSE: SMR), the small modular reactor designer, closed at $9.71, down about 2.8%. It’s about 3% off the $10 price it began trading at five weeks ago.
Dutch Bros (NYSE: BROS), which went public last year, gave up 3.8% of its value Monday. At $33.11, the coffee and sweet drinkers purveyor was well off a $76.25 peak close achieved on Nov. 1, but also comfortably above a trading low of $20.05 hit last month on a poorly received quarterly update.
All the major stock indexes were down sharply on Monday — 3.9% for the S&P 500, 2.8% for the Dow Industrials and 4.7% for the Nasdaq.
