And this is so not part of a scheme to get the subscription price of an IPO higher than the institutional investors will tolerate.
I am perhaps to cynical here, feel free to dismiss my rant, but as Andressen pointed out a lot of the "value" is being captured on the internal rounds these days, not post IPO. And what that means is that when a stock comes to market it can be "hard" to get the valuation of the company to match its last round, much less get it above that. And as we saw with Box, coming in under often means having to accommodate your late stage investors some how.
So lets bring in retail investors! And with enough of those folks we can have them raise the price of the IPO roadshow and well if the price is flat to down after that and they lose all their money, too bad. But hey they were "in at the IPO" right? Watch your prospectuses closely boys and girls, I bet on these same IPOs we'll have "investor participation" which is code for the late stage investors selling their shares in the IPO rather than having the company collect the proceeds.
See? JP Morgan thinks they are doing everyone a favor and all I can see is a barely disguised scheme for the private investors to fleece the retail folks out of their money.
It's basically an admission that the big investors got "preferences" on the previous rounds that nobody wants to deal with. So, they'll try to sucker the general public.
This reminds me of what Google tried[1] (with limited success[2]) to do with their IPO.
During the Dot-com Boom, allocations of shares in hot IPOs were highly sought after, as investment banks seemed to consistently price the offerings to guarantee a pop in first-day trading, and award allocations to their favoured clients. Effectively, the investment banks were under-pricing the shares such that the company going public "left money on the table", which got picked up (at relatively low risk) by the i-banks' preferred clients.
Companies seem to have grown wise to this and started putting more pressure on the i-banks to ensure they don't end up leaving money on the table (c.f. Facebook, Pure Storage). Therefore, the i-banks' favoured clients are less interested in taking IPO allocations, so the i-banks need to widen the net to find more investor demand.
True. Funny thing that may or may not be a motivating factor. Except for Google and Facebook, a lot of recent IPOs are trading below their offer price. Maybe the bigger I-bank clients recognize this (even mutual funds) so they are buying at the pre-IPO in late financing rounds. However, they still need someone to buy at the IPO, and who better than Joe Public?
The Google and FaceBook IPOs were considered a failure (by conventional wisdom standards). Of course, the money went to them and not the wall street bankers.
This always cracks me up. In reality they got the price correct and maximized the money that the company got for doing the IPO in the first place. The problem is that there is an expectation that IPO stocks will 'pop' and allow wall street to line their own pockets. Since they didn't, they consider it a failure.
Imagine the comments in here if IPOs were already available to everyone and we were reversing it to only allow big banks and partners to participate.
I personally am for everyone having equal access to IPOs and start-up funding and such. Anything else is opposed to the founding principle of this country of personal liberty-- and it's also opposed to reducing the wealth disparity.
In summary, it's not your job to protect me from myself.
This plus the other news about NASDAQ doing similar moves I think is a bad sign. Public markets are clearly indicating they are failing to attract the big players, especially in technology, and this is their strategy.
The problem is, if their strategy works, the public would be way more exposed to risk like they were in 99/00 and any bubble bursting would have big impacts. As of now any bubble wouldn't have that widespread of ramifications.
On the flip side, this would likely drive markets up for a while and show a paper "improvement" of the economy because the numbers are public and auditable. Wouldn't last though.
True, but you could make good money as well by having access to all IPO-s. I did the math a while back and selling the first day you could average around 10%, which is nothing to sneeze at.
No those who buy the IPO generally do quite OK since IPO shares are generally priced to get the most funding possible, not necessarily the highest share price. Restrictions on selling after IPOs also generally help support the price.
Historically, those who buy into IPOs do quite well.
I don't know if Motif does this, but a lot of trading is done where the trader _gets paid_ by the exchange or pool for making a trade. JP Morgan know this too.
This limited access to IPOs in the U.S. has always seemed very…limiting and also kind of unfair.
In India, IPOs approved by SEBI (the equivalent of SEC in the U.S.) have been available to all retail investors for a very long time and has improved a lot with online brokerages over the last 15+ years. You just need to have a demat account, which you could also open along side the application for the IPO. I don't understand why companies going public in the U.S. wouldn't want a wider reach for IPOs, which can easily come by getting retail investors to participate.
Some first day pop is natural even with auctions, because the issue price has to be a lowest that buyers support.
Consider a company that wants to raise $100. Suppose there are 19 buyers who value a share at all different prices from $1 to $19, and are willing to buy 1 share each. The issue price will be $10. Those who offered $1-$9 will not get an allocation; those who offered from $10 to $19 will. The buyer who thinks a share is worth $19 will probably buy some at a > than $10 price, so voila a pop.
While it's possible, in practice it's generally difficult to short IPOs because your broker needs to locate shares and underwriter restrictions in the borrow process.
"There is often a significant “pop” on a company’s first day of trading as a public company, with double-digit percentage gains in the share price. But the gains are based on the IPO price that gets determined the night before the first day of trading — the price where the stock opens is often much higher."
If I was a founder/VC, what I would be looking for out of this is not leaving money on the table (as others have mentioned).
The greatest thing for me on IPO day would be to go down by 5% on the public markets instead of popping. That means my company got an appropriate amount of cash by putting shares out onto the public market.
I am perhaps to cynical here, feel free to dismiss my rant, but as Andressen pointed out a lot of the "value" is being captured on the internal rounds these days, not post IPO. And what that means is that when a stock comes to market it can be "hard" to get the valuation of the company to match its last round, much less get it above that. And as we saw with Box, coming in under often means having to accommodate your late stage investors some how.
So lets bring in retail investors! And with enough of those folks we can have them raise the price of the IPO roadshow and well if the price is flat to down after that and they lose all their money, too bad. But hey they were "in at the IPO" right? Watch your prospectuses closely boys and girls, I bet on these same IPOs we'll have "investor participation" which is code for the late stage investors selling their shares in the IPO rather than having the company collect the proceeds.
See? JP Morgan thinks they are doing everyone a favor and all I can see is a barely disguised scheme for the private investors to fleece the retail folks out of their money.