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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

edited the comment,

$45 was the IPO price, meant it will be the fist time since 2008 that a major IPO closed below its IPO price on the first day of trading.

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curious: how do you define major here considering that it is the qualification upon which the entire statement stands?

Successful IPOs are successful. A tautology.

Uber is going to rest at $200, i believe

I think Spotify also fell below its IPO opening price as well at the end of the day.

Spotify didn't IPO: they did a direct listing.

It was still an IPO, just an untraditional one.

But to that point there was no "IPO price", i.e. the price paid by institutional clients before the first day of public trading, so there was nothing to fall below (there was a "reference price", but that's just more like the MSRP given by the stock exchange, not what anyone actually paid).

It was not an IPO as there was no public offering. Instead, the company filled an S-1 and was listed on an exchange allowing for secondary trading.

Uber is currently well below it’s IPO price. Historically, that’s not uncommon.

> Historically, that’s not uncommon.

Really? I was under the impression that closing below your IPO price is quite rare indeed. Do you have other data?

Edit: actually, just saw a NYTimes article with info that it is indeed rare:

Since 2000, only 18 companies valued at more than $1 billion and listing on American exchanges have opened below their I.P.O. price. On average, tech stocks have jumped — or “popped,” in Wall Street parlance — 21 percent on their first day of trading over the past 24 years, according to Dealogic.

I would call 18 common, relative to the number of recent IPO’s over 1 Billion dollars. It’s definitely not the majority, but it’s common enough to make leverage extremely risky.

You have an odd definition of "common". That's 18 over a total of nearly 20 years. The billion threshold is for total company valuation, which at least recently is most companies listed, not amount raised.

As of today, 15 of the last 50 IPO’s where down, with one exactly breaking even. I think most people would call 30% common.

2008 has 31 Total IPO’s, restrict that to 1+ billion and you are not talking about a huge list. Restrict that to an unusual few years and it’s easy for an abnormal but meaningless pattern to show up. But, we have no need to make such assumptions.

PS: Facebook is something of an oddity, opening day has technical issues which ended up inflating the price.

> Uber is currently well below it’s IPO price. Historically, that’s not uncommon.

The claim was that Uber might be the first major IPO to close below its IPO price that day.

If its not that uncommon then please show me the other major IPO's that traded below their IPO price on the day they went public.

I'll wait :)

Off the top of my head.

Alstom and CIT Group where both top 20 IPO’s of all time and they fell opening day. Several others where up and down at various points in the day. Which is more my point, being down at some point on opening day is fairly common.

Again, the claim was since 2008 there hasn't been a major IPO to close below its IPO price.

And you site an IPO form the 90's? sigh...

Saying it has not happened in 10 years is not the same as saying it’s uncommon. 1+ billion dollars IPO’s is a tiny sample set and completely arbitrary cutoff points. Go back another 8 years and you can find 18.

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