The Briefing: Compass, Deliveroo Show Fundamentals Still Count

When you’re hot, you’re hot, like an electric vehicle startup on Wall Street today. And when you’re not, you’re...Compass or Deliveroo. That’s the takeaway from a day of extremes on the stock market. In London, Deliveroo, the U.K. restaurant meal delivery service, tanked on its public debut, falling 26% below its below-expectations IPO price.

In New York, meanwhile, real estate brokerage Compass looks like it is heading for a similar outcome. The SoftBank-backed firm slashed the size of its IPO, cutting both the number of shares to be sold by 30% and the price by 25%. Compass will raise little more than half what it originally hoped. That doesn’t augur well for where it trades when the IPO actually happens. Both companies appear to be suffering from investor wariness about heavy losses in industries where near-term prospects are uncertain.