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Big IPOs, in facts.
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names on the desk
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Every listing below is measured from its first-day close — the first price a retail buyer could actually get. The gap between the offer price and that close, the famous “pop,” went to allocated institutions before public trading began. What happened after the close is the part that belongs to everyone else. The academic base rates sit underneath.
Listings tracked
23
Median day-1 pop
+17.6%
offer → first close
Median since day-1 close
-22.6%
Below day-1 close now
16 of 22
Returns from the first-day close, split-adjusted daily closes via the market-data pipeline; refreshed hourly. The pop column is offer → first close — allocation income, deliberately not colored as a gain. Education, not investment advice.
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.