Think: volatile IPO, pre-pricing. Lots of ambiguity. Is this company AMZN? Or is it uh...Groupon. Or worse?
The offering price is the price the bankers are setting such that buyers...buy. So if a given company is going to come public by selling 10 million shares at an offering price of $20, then the company itself might keep $19.50 times 10 million, or $195 million; the bank keeps 50 cents a share, or $5 million. If the IPO is hot, then the first publicly traded print might be like $32.40 and go up from there. That price doesn't matter to the company, however. They've already sold their 10 million shares at $19.50, "under pricing" themselves by a dozen bucks or so a share.
And this whole notion of under pricing is kind of a kitschy click-bait-getting thing from journalists who don't really live inside or understand the trenches of how companies actually come public. In fact, IPOs generally "need to be" under priced so that there is certainty of getting all the shares placed, and so that if the markets are choppy, the IPO price doesn't trade below the offering price. If it does, then original buyers who paid $20 will be angry and not return when the stock is at $18 or $15 or $10. Huge work then to repair damaged relationships.
So, in fact, in most cases, it's the company itself who leans conservative in the pricing of their IPO, because they'd rather raise a bit less money, sell a few fewer shares, but have a public currency...than wrest evey penny from the offering and then go into a soft market (through no fault of their own) and have their IPO be quickly underwater, and lose sponsorship from the Street. If they get greedy later, they can always sell more shares in a secondary offering at that $32-ish price and go nuts. High-priced nuts.
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What is an Interstate Offering?0 Views
Finance allah shmoop what is an interstate offering When companies
issue an offering of stocks or bonds or other securities
Well they can sell shares in their state or in
more than one state interstate So why is this even
a thing Well it wasn't before nineteen thirty three but
then there was the advent of this little act cleverly
titled the securities act of nineteen thirty three and it
regulated the offering of securities to the public and that's
a thing because state laws often differ among states and
sometimes from federal laws like think about how marijuana works
these days It's legal ish in a number of blue
states at least as of two thousand nineteen But it's
not federally legal like it's not legal in the entire
country So if you're a poor nfl player wanting to
get stoned and you're in this state or that seo
what do you do What do you do All right
well securities have the same issues Lots of small technical
lawyerly things But they matter in a court of law
when problems arise and in the investing landscape well they
invariably do You have problems arise all the time so
say a volume real estate developer wants to build a
chain of robotically managed old age homes If she's raising
money on lee from her home state then she doesn't
need to deal with all kinds of federal filings Well
she just follows whatever rules her state tells her to
follow and she can go bang a tangerine and hope
to raise dough from mon paw investor bumpkin But if
she wants to expand her fundraising efforts across state borders
even doing just one more state well then she has
to file all the paperwork for an inter state offering
which is almost always meaningful eam or complex Because you're
now interstates you've got at least two states rules you
have to comply with Why would she even care Like
why not just file in the state in which your
based and raise all your money there in that state
Well legally if you do business outside of your state
you have what's called sufficient ties to basically let the
law view you as being fully ensconced in all the
states in which you're doing business you legally can from
a corporate perspective live or do business in north dakota
Minnesota michigan and wisconsin hope you like not being able
to feel your fingers up there if they choose door
number two meaning the cross state means of raising money
for the old age home Well then that's an interstate
offering and it'll mean a whole lot more paperwork The
company will need to register with every state that they're
raising money in And with the sec the benefit of
registering federally for an offering dough federally meaning registering to
do business in all states So you comply with federal
law which is usually stricter and more dicey than state
law And simply put there's mohr investor dough available nationally
than there is in any given individual state So your
odds of catching a fish get way better if you're
fishing in the ocean then if you're just fishing in
one of fifty ponds and if you're ice fishing while 00:03:09.193 --> [endTime] good luck avoiding hypothermia we're looking atyou North dakota
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