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(Bloomberg) -- Wall Street is working to usher a highly-anticipated group of companies to the public markets, but rampant volatility and a brutal market selloff are threatening to block their path.

The most promising candidates for US initial public offerings, having spent months or years making their case to prospective investors, are weighing whether they can pull off carefully choreographed listing plans with all the geopolitical and macroeconomic uncertainty swirling around them.

“The rapid changes in valuation that we’ve seen recently have massive implications on the IPO market and what can and can’t get done,” said Josh Weismer, head of equity capital markets at Mizuho Americas. “However, the reality you have to face as a company or a sponsor is that the valuation available today could look different than the valuation you could’ve gotten two weeks ago, and that might change again in two more weeks.”

Those expectations will be heavily influenced by the 9.7% slide from a February record for the benchmark S&P 500, with the volatility index popping back above levels seen as a danger zone for IPO activity. Pile on an ever-changing tariff war, a rash of choppy economic data muddling the ability for finance chiefs to confidently forecast sales expectations, and warnings of growing recession risks, and it’s tough sledding.

“The ability to forecast and predict financial performance given all of the headline risk and volatility is meaningfully more difficult,” said Evan Riley, Americas head of equity capital markets at BNP Paribas SA. “If the market continues to underperform then maintaining the focus from investors gets tougher.”

That attention is likely to be tested when cloud computing company CoreWeave Inc. hits the road to meet investors this month and as payments firm Klarna and Hinge Health Inc., a provider of digital physical therapy, march toward listings.

The lofty targets for the CoreWeave and Klarna IPOs may make them harder to pull off in a down market. The closely-watched Nvidia Corp.-backed cloud provider could raise about $4 billion in an IPO valuing the company at more than $35 billion, while Klarna is seeking to raise at least $1 billion at a greater than $15 billion valuation, Bloomberg News has reported.

Bankers on the deals point to the strength of Arm Holdings Plc’s $5.2 billion IPO in 2023 — which ended a nearly two year drought of sizable US listings — as a sign that big deals can get done even in uncertain times. Arm’s shares have more than doubled since.

The US market for IPOs has perked up relative to 2024’s underwhelming pace. First-time share sales have raised $10.2 billion through March 11, a 41% bump from last year, data compiled by Bloomberg show. However, performance has been poor, with shares in the 20 companies raising $200 million or more down an average of 15%.

“These are tricky markets, the urgency to push forward with an IPO in this market is fading a little bit,” said Douglas Adams, global head of ECM at Citigroup Inc. “A number of companies are preparing to go public but the precise timing of launching their IPOs is to be determined.”

That’s a marked contrast to the mood at the end of 2024, when Wall Street was antsy for a surge of corporate takeovers and a rush of IPOs. A number of bankers felt that so long as incoming President Donald Trump didn’t stir volatility, activity would blossom.

“There is certainly a bit more nervousness on the outlook for the ECM market than there was at the start of the year,” said Tom Swerling, global co-head of ECM at Barclays Plc. “The volatility we’re seeing and the geopolitical uncertainty is beginning to impact on how the market is looking at deals.”