Guides

The whole process in three steps: open a brokerage account, enter the lottery, and buy the shares if you win. Written for people who have never bought a share in Japan.

Which broker you apply through changes your odds. The three things that matter: how many listings it handles, whether its lottery is equal, and whether it wants your money before you apply.

How to pick between the listings open at any one time: what to look at, how much money each one needs, and why applying for everything is a perfectly respectable strategy.

The application window is only a few days long. The sequence from listing approval to the first day of trading, and the two deadlines where people most often lose an allocation they had already won.

The basic play is selling on the first day of trading at the opening price. How the offer price and the first traded price relate, the three steps involved, and the risk nobody advertises.

You cannot outsmart a random draw, but you can change how many draws you are in. Six practical things that raise your chances, and one honest note about how hard winning actually is.

Between about 21,000 and 452,000 yen depending on the listing, with a median around 130,000. And at some brokers you can apply with nothing in the account at all.

Each family member applying in their own name multiplies your household's entries. Where the legal line sits, which brokers allow accounts for under-18s, and the traps to avoid.

Three types of draw — fully equal, weighted by money, and weighted by your record — and how the major Japanese brokers combine them. Which ones actually give a small balance a fair chance.

The lead underwriter takes roughly 70 to 80 per cent of the shares on a listing. Checking who leads before you apply, and holding accounts at the firms that lead most often, is the single clearest lever you have.

You cannot apply for a single share. Where the 100-share unit comes from, why the fractional-share services that let you buy one share do not work for IPOs, and what to do about it if your capital is limited.

Winning does not mean you own the shares. What you have to do next, the deadlines for funding and confirming, what happens if you decline, and how a reserve allocation works.

Yes — but the losing patterns are predictable: IPOs that open below the offer price, and why the easiest allocations to win are the riskiest.