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Comment by dukeofdoom | Hacker News Reader

So how does one buy ipo shares? One of my resolutions for this year was to buy shares in companies I do business with.

Be a giant investor, ie a bank. IPOs are there for banks to be able to buy up shares at a low price, then dump it when retail investors get their turn to run it up before banks sell off.

another option is that one can also choose to be rich to gain access to more wealth:

https://www.investor.gov/introduction-investing/general-reso...

200k/yr for 2 yrs, or >1M net worth % price(house).

being an accredited investor doesn’t magically get you IPO shares. they are very scarce and almost completely allocated to high volume institutions (you might get lucky if you have a very large relationship with one such institution but that’s harder and harder these days)

So not for us "poors" making less than that. They really hate retail investors

insert angry punk sentiment here

Why isn't it regulated in the US? In India everybody gets a chance to buy in IPOs, it's randomly assigned regardless of how much you applied for. Promoters and institutional investors are even supposed to hold it for 9 months before they can sell it in the market.

all decisions in the US are driven by dollars, and the guidelines are usually made by those that have a lot of dollars. so they create circular situations to benefit themselves.

I think you can just take the Series 65 and be good to go these days

You can sometimes buy pre-ipo shares on EquityZen or similar platforms if you meet certain standards. It's all very thinly offered though, and sometimes they bundle offers.

They allocate chunks to the big brokerages and you can apply for a piece. Think you need to meet sophisticated investor criteria tho

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