IPO Investment – Myth Busted By Statistics

IPO investments are definitely a hype. I don’t like IPOs as a investment due to the excessive marketing which makes it much tougher to find the fundamental value of the company and makes a retail investor more gullible.

IPOs just make gullible investors get excited by creating excessive hype, especially with the promise of making the investor super-rich in a shorted period of time. I have read The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham and remember that  he also recommends that investors should stay clear of IPOs. The simple reason is that IPO is raised to get capital which results in a premium price and offers a very little choice to buy the stock at a discount.

So just to validate this I decided to look at all the IPOs from 1 Jan 2010 till now and to check out the issue price Vs current price of the stock and here is the table:

                     

If you look carefully, all the red-lines are the ones which are giving negative returns (essentially in loss), while all the orange-lines are the ones giving less than 10% returns. So this actually validates what Benjamin Graham has been preaching for so long:

1) Out of 57 IPOs only 21 IPOs are actually providing gains of more than 10%. So essentially only 36% of IPOs are giving decent returns

2) Out of 57 IPOs only 4 IPOs actually make returns more than double. So essentially 7% of IPOs are giving exceptional returns

3) Out of 30 IPOs in losses only 7 IPOs actually gives loss in single digits (i.e. < 10%). In essence, 77% of loss making IPOs are giving losses more than 10%

This definitely busts the myth that IPOs are a source of short term quick gains. Some of these IPOs can actually go above their issue price after certain years, but that again indicates that prices during IPOs are at higher premium.

The “get rich quick” hype generated during the IPOs are typically by the marketing companies and promoters of IPO companies to raise the premium price for mopping up more cash, but for the retail investor it is much better to wait for few days after listing, before investing in the IPOs and that too after the value study of the company.

The only people who possibly gain from IPOs are definitely other than retail investors.