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Big IPOs, in facts.
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names on the desk
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Listings pull attention; facts protect it. A company on its first trading day has no quarterly filings, no insider-filing history — nothing readable yet. What it does have is a schedule: dated events where real information starts to arrive. That schedule is below, with the behavioral base rates underneath.
A confidential draft S-1 puts nothing on the public record except the company’s own announcement. Once the prospectus is on EDGAR the financials, holders and lockup terms are readable; the share count and price range arrive with an amended S-1 ahead of the roadshow.
The average US IPO has closed its first day about 18% above the offer price across 1980–2023 (Ritter, University of Florida IPO statistics). The pop reflects deliberate underpricing and attention — it says nothing new about the business.
Individual investors are net buyers of attention-grabbing stocks — names in the news, with extreme volume or extreme one-day returns — and that buying pattern predicts underperformance (Barber & Odean, 'All That Glitters', 2008). IPOs are the single most attention-concentrated event in markets.
IPOs as a group have underperformed size-matched peers over the three years after listing (Ritter 1991, confirmed in updated samples through 2023). The lag concentrates in smaller and unprofitable issuers — the kind retail buys most eagerly.
When the (typically 180-day) lockup ends, insiders can sell for the first time. Expiry weeks have historically run ~1.5% below market with a permanent ~40% volume increase (Field & Hanka 2001). It is on the calendar from day one.
Underwriters' analysts must wait 10 calendar days before publishing (FINRA Rule 2241). Coverage then arrives in a cluster and skews positive (Bradley, Jordan & Ritter 2003) — initiation-day enthusiasm is a schedule, not a discovery.
Historical base rates from published academic research, cited inline. Education, not investment advice.
Every morning, Contra reads the stock, commodity, and bond markets for the patterns that move retail returns — and says “no view” when there’s nothing to read, which is the honest answer on most IPO day-ones.