The SPAC lifecycle, date by date.

The IPO and the trust

A special purpose acquisition company raises money first and finds a business afterwards. It IPOs with no operations, no revenue and no target — a blank cheque, run by a sponsor, listed like any other stock. The 239 SPACs covered here hold $40.5B raised between them, at a median of $200M each.

You buy a unit at $10.00. A unit is one share plus a fraction of a warrant, and sometimes a right — a sliver of extra stock delivered later. Almost the entire $10.00 goes into a trust account that holds short-dated Treasuries and nothing else. The sponsor pays the underwriting and running costs separately, which is why the trust can hold $10.00 or more per share when the public only paid $10.00.

The trust is the floor, and it is a real one. Every public share carries the right to be redeemed for its share of that account — not at the market price, at the trust balance, in cash. That right survives whether you vote for the deal, against it, or not at all. It is the single feature that makes a SPAC different from every other stock you can buy, and everything on this page is about the dates on which it can be exercised or lost.

The trust earns interest, so trust per share drifts up over the SPAC's life — a $10.00 trust funded today is worth more than $10.00 in a year. Tax on that interest is usually payable out of the trust itself, so the balance does not compound quite as cleanly as the yield suggests.

Units come apart

Roughly 52 days after the IPO — the prospectus gives the date — the unit splits. The share and the warrant get their own tickers and trade independently, and from that point the three lines can drift against each other for months.

A warrant is a right to buy a share later, typically at $11.50, and it is worth nothing at all unless a deal closes and the stock climbs above that. Warrants routinely move 30% on news that moves the share 3%. They are the leveraged leg of the structure and they are where most of the money is lost.

The search, and the clock

The charter fixes how long the sponsor has: commonly 18 to 24 months, and lately often 12 with the option to buy more time monthly. Miss it and the trust goes back to shareholders. That deadline is the most consequential number in the document and it is not standardised — it is whatever this SPAC's charter says, which is why a generic "SPACs have two years" is a bad way to hold one.

Of the SPACs covered here, 67 listed within the last six months and have a full clock ahead of them; the median has been searching for 10 months. 46 are past 18 months and 15 are past 24 — every one of those has either extended already or is about to ask.

While the search runs, the share price mostly does not move. 80 of 239 closed within a dime of $10.00, because a pre-deal SPAC is a Treasury fund with a lottery ticket stapled to it and the market prices it accordingly. 37 trade below $10.00, which usually says something about how long the money is expected to be tied up rather than about the sponsor.

A deal is announced

The sponsor signs a business combination agreement and files an 8-K, usually with a presentation full of projections that the SPAC's own filings will later disclaim. This is the moment the shares stop behaving like cash and start behaving like an opinion about the target.

It is also the moment to read the terms rather than the deck. The three questions that decide what a holder actually ends up owning: how much of the trust is expected to survive redemptions, how much new money is coming in beside it (the PIPE), and how many shares the sponsor and target insiders keep. A deal can close with 95% of the trust redeemed — the company goes public with a fraction of the cash the headline promised, and the announcement never mentions the possibility.

Signed is not closed. Deals are terminated between announcement and vote often enough that the gap between the share price and trust value is a live market judgement, not an arbitrage.

The vote and the redemption

Before the combination can close, shareholders vote, and the merger proxy sets the redemption mechanics. The redemption election deadline is the date to put in a calendar — typically two business days before the meeting, and your broker will impose its own cutoff a day or two earlier again. Miss it and you are a shareholder in the merged company at whatever the stock is worth the morning after, which is frequently well below the trust value you could have taken in cash.

Redeeming does not require voting against the deal, and voting against it does not redeem you. They are separate instructions and only one of them returns money.

The same right appears at every extension vote. When a sponsor asks for more time, holders who want out get the chance to take trust value instead — which is why extension votes routinely see most of the trust walk out the door.

Closing, or liquidation

On closing the shell becomes the target: new name, new ticker, the surviving cash on its balance sheet. The founder shares — the sponsor's promote, typically about 20% of the post-IPO share count, bought for a nominal sum — convert into ordinary stock at that point. Their cost was nil and their dilution is permanent, which is the trade every de-SPAC shareholder makes without being asked. Lock-ups, commonly 180 days, decide when that stock can be sold into the market.

If no deal closes in time, the SPAC liquidates. Public shareholders receive their share of the trust in cash, generally within a couple of weeks; the sponsor's founder shares and every warrant on issue expire worthless. For someone who bought at or below trust value, liquidation is not a disaster — it is the structure working exactly as written.

The dates to watch

Each of these is set by a particular SPAC's own documents. The timings below are the market's usual conventions and are worth exactly as much as the filing that confirms them. To take them one at a time — what happens, what it means for a holder, and the trap at each — walk the timeline stage by stage.