Vanda Research Projects Record $250 Million in Retail Buying for Anthropic's Nov. 19 Nasdaq Debut

Since Anthropic set its IPO range at $70 to $78 a share and a valuation of up to $1.4 trillion, the open question has shifted from price to who will buy. A Wednesday, Nov. 11 note from Vanda Research offers one answer for the retail side: a lot, and possibly a record.

Vanda expects about $250 million in net retail buying when Anthropic's shares begin trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker "ANT." The debut is expected on Nov. 19, and the shares have not yet traded. SpaceX drew $118 million in net retail buying when it listed in June.

"Judging by pre-IPO perp trading, Anthropic is shaping up to be a record retail IPO," Viraj Patel, Vanda's global macro strategist, wrote in the note.

How Vanda got to $250 million

The estimate is built on perpetual futures. These are derivatives with no expiry date that trade on Hyperliquid and Coinbase and let traders bet on a private company's valuation. They carry no direct claim on Anthropic's shares and are priced against its latest disclosed pre-IPO valuation.

Volume in the Anthropic contract hit a record $270 million on Tuesday, Nov. 10, nearly three times the daily levels of the prior week, according to Vanda. The firm assumes retail turnover on a debut day runs about five times the peak daily volume in the pre-IPO derivatives. That yields roughly $1.4 billion in total retail turnover and about $250 million in net buying.

Vanda also said only six stocks have topped $250 million in single-day retail buying since 2024, with Nvidia and Tesla accounting for nearly all of those sessions. "Anthropic next week could draw the kind of retail buying that we've rarely seen in our data," the firm said.

It is a modeled projection, not a count of orders, and it rests on a five-times multiplier that Vanda chose.

A small slice of a very large deal

At the top of the range, Anthropic plans to sell 825 million shares and raise up to $64.4 billion, according to its SEC filing. A separate $26 billion private placement with AMD, Alphabet, Broadcom, Micron, Microsoft and Nvidia would bring the total target to about $90 billion.

Against that, $250 million in net retail buying is about 0.4% of the public offering. Vanda's own framing is that institutions, not retail, will decide how the stock trades.

The filing also lets certain non-founder insiders sell up to 10% of their shares on day one. It sets more than 20 dates over the following year on which non-founder employees can sell. Board member Reed Hastings has signaled plans to buy $300 million of shares through his donor-advised fund, and fellow board member Christopher Liddell $3 million.

What the prospectus says about the numbers

The valuation is already below some earlier talk. Investors had floated figures as high as $2 trillion earlier this year, and Anthropic's last private round in the spring valued it at $965 billion.

The filing shows a company growing fast and losing money. Anthropic reported first-half revenue of $16.3 billion, up 1,300%, and adjusted operating income of $1.6 billion, against a $1.8 billion loss a year earlier. It also reported a net loss of nearly $81 billion for January through June.

The nine-month net loss was $104 billion, which the company said was largely driven by non-cash accounting charges. Anthropic has not turned an annual profit.

It disclosed more than $895 billion in aggregate spending commitments under purchase agreements and leases, "substantially all of which is related to compute and infrastructure." It expects to incur about $448 billion of that by the end of 2030 and another $448 billion between 2031 and 2045. The prospectus says it does not expect this year's revenue growth to be sustainable.

Governance and the bubble argument

Retail buyers will get limited say in how the company is run. Anthropic's seven co-founders will hold supervoting Class F shares. The filing describes that stock in different places as carrying 51.1% and 50.1% of the vote. The Long-Term Benefit Trust will also elect a majority of the board.

On valuation, Willy Lee, principal at Neostellar, told The Epoch Times that investors are asking whether Anthropic's AI growth story is durable and whether it can gain market share in the broader AI market.

Jason Katz, a UBS managing director and senior portfolio manager, argued on Fox Business' "Varney & Co." on Tuesday that investors are misreading AI risk. He said today's boom differs from the dot-com bubble because it is being driven by sophisticated technology companies rather than individual investors.

A record day of retail buying is the kind of data point that sits awkwardly next to that argument. Vanda's number is a forecast, and Katz's view is his own.

What comes next

Shares are expected to open on Nov. 19. A reported trading date has not been officially announced by the company. The pricing within the $70 to $78 range, and how much of the 825 million shares institutions absorb, will show whether a trillion-dollar valuation holds once the stock actually trades.