How to read an IPO
An IPO is the first time a company sells its shares to the public. These are the terms you will see on every page, in plain English.
The terms
All of these come from the final prospectus, the document filed with the SEC when the price is set.
- Offered
- How many shares the company, and sometimes its early owners, sell to the public in the IPO.
- Price per share
- What each share sold for in the IPO. This is not the price the stock trades at once it is listed.
- Raised
- Shares offered times price per share. The company does not keep all of it: banks and other costs come out first.
- Bank fee
- What the banks that run the IPO keep for selling the shares, also called the underwriting discount.
- Lead banks
- The banks that organize the IPO and sell the shares to investors. They are named on the front of the prospectus.
If we can’t back a number up, we leave it out
Every figure on a page has one of these labels and a source you can open.
Checked
Read from the filing, and the arithmetic holds: shares times price equals the total.
From the prospectus
Taken from the document, but the SEC’s own data cannot confirm it yet. We say so on the page.
Not shown
We could not find it with confidence, so there is no number. A blank beats a wrong answer.
Companies we list before they price
An IPO page normally appears after the final prospectus, when the price is set. We make a rare exception for a company that has filed a public registration statement but not priced yet. It needs two things. First, it must be very large (a stated offering of $1 billion or more) or widely followed (about 50,000 or more Wikipedia page views a month). Second, a person must approve it. Those pages show only filing dates and links, never a price, size or valuation, until a filing states one.
Where the filings come from
Stockadora reads public filings on the SEC’s EDGAR system. Each page links the filing it used, so you can check any number yourself. We do not give investment advice and we do not take ads for stocks.