From listing approval to the first day of trading
If you have followed IPOs in other markets, the Japanese process will feel unusual in three ways: the price is fixed in advance for everyone, shares are handed out by lottery rather than by relationship, and winning the lottery does not always mean you have bought anything.
The exchange approves the company to list, and the schedule becomes public. From here you usually have about a week before applications close. This is why people who only check occasionally miss most IPOs.
The application window. You state how many shares you want. Unlike some markets, retail investors here are not negotiating a price — you are effectively queuing for an allocation at a price that is about to be fixed.
A single price is set for everyone. This is the price you pay if you are allocated shares. It does not move.
Demand almost always exceeds supply, so allocation is decided by lottery. How that lottery works differs sharply between brokers — some give every applicant one equal ticket, others weight it by how much you applied for or by your history with them.
At some brokers, winning is not the end. You must separately confirm that you want to buy, within a short window. Miss it and the shares go to someone else. This is the single most common way people lose an allocation they had already won.
Trading opens. The first price the market sets is the first traded price. If it is above the offer price, selling into that open realises the difference. If it is below, you are already at a loss.
You cannot outsmart a lottery. What you can change is how many lotteries you are in. Each broker underwriting an IPO runs its own draw, so holding accounts at several brokers multiplies your entries for the same listing.
The second lever is money. Some brokers require the cash to be sitting in your account before you apply, which limits how many applications you can run at once. Brokers that do not require this let you enter everywhere with the same funds.
Compare brokers →Shares do open below their offer price. It happens regularly, and when it does you are holding a loss from the first second of trading. Any site that only shows you the winners is not showing you the business. The listing results on this site include every listing recorded, including the ones that fell.
Nothing here is investment advice. Past listing results do not predict future ones.
← Back to the English overview