CarGurus shares rocket 80% on their first day of trading http://ift.tt/2yjLoUz

Shares of CarGurus Inc. rocketed more than 80% Thursday on their first day of trading as a public company.

CarGurus

CARG, +77.09%

an online marketplace for new and used vehicles, sold 9.4 million shares at $16 apiece late Wednesday to raise $150 million. The pricing was above the company’s $13 to $15 price range. The Cambridge, Mass., company’s stock is trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker symbol ‘CARG’.

The strong price move makes it the best-performing U.S. IPO so far this year, in terms of the offer-to-opening trade, according to Dealogic. Shares of Snap Inc.

SNAP, +2.59%

 rose 41% on their first day of trade to make that deal the fifth-best performer of the year.

The most recent tech IPO was of data center design and operations company Switch Inc.

SWCH, +2.59%

last week, which gained 21.9% on its first day of trade. Before that, Roku Inc.

ROKU, +0.55%

gained almost 68% in its trading debut.

Read now: After booming IPO, Roku thinks this is the future of the company

Related: 5 ways tech startups are avoiding IPOs

In its IPO prospectus released last month, CarGurus said it had “an active dealer network” of more than 40,000 dealers as of June, and its more than 5.4 million car listings are the most available on major U.S. online automotive marketplaces.

The company listed a profit $8.6 million, or 8 cents a share, in the in the first six months of 2017, compared with $521,0000, or 1 cent a share, in the year-ago period. It listed $143 million in revenue for the January-to-June period, compared with $80 million a year ago.

See now: MongoDB IPO: 5 things to know about database-software ‘unicorn’

The company said it had more than 25 million average monthly unique users in the U.S. and overseas as of June, compared with more than 21 million users in all of 2016.

CarGurus founder and Chief Executive Langley Steinert is a co-founder of TripAdvisor Inc.

TRIP, -1.98%

 

Snap shares have gained about 7% in the last three months, while the S&P 500

SPX, -0.05%

 has gained 4.5% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average has gained about 6%.