Just like we have done for the last two years, we decided to make our January 2024 newsletter a M&A special that looks back at the state of U.S. M&A activity over the last year. We covered our year-end thoughts in the article 2023: A Rollicking Year last week and plan to scale back exposure in the model portfolio significantly as discussed in that article.
Despite strong market returns in 2023, investment bankers were not happy about how the year turned out. Not only did IPO volume decline (a 15% decline year-over-year) but U.S. M&A activity declined by 11.35% to $672 billion worth of deals announced. This was the second year of decline as deal volume in 2022 had shrunk 9.9% compared to 2021.