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I recently tried to witness an Initial Public Offering on a trading platform. What struck me is that it seemed to be different according to who the investors were. Indeed, at the time some newspaper already wrote an article about how successful the IPO was for the company, people were already complaining that the stock was still not available on the trading platform social community. The day after somebody wrote a long comment saying that:

The process that has been used to launch the IPO (...) is called "hybrid auction".

  1. Some groups of people were allowed to "reserve" stocks at a lower, fixed price. These included existing investors, employees, and in the case of the company even some apartment tenants

  2. The previous point increased demand and market buzz. Then, bids were opened for other funds and institutional investors. This increased demand and price even more.

  3. The stocks entered the market, but first for professional agents only. They could still secure a reasonable price, yet this increased demand and evaluations further.

  4. Finally, the stocks were made available on portals like ours, when the price was already sky-high.

It leaves me the feeling of market manipulation as it times a product scarcity, but that's not my question. My question is: what are the different kinds of IPOs?

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  • You probably need to add a country tag here to get an answer as there are likely to be differences between jurisdictions, perhaps even individual stock exchanges.
    – marktristan
    Jan 13, 2021 at 17:23

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In a broad sense, there are two common types of IPO: Fixed Price Offering and Book Building Offering.

There can be many variations in the underwriting agreement. For example, Best Effort, Firm Commitment, Dutch Auction, All Or None, etc. Google for details.

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