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http://ipo.google.com/ went live Friday, and contains information about Google upcoming initial public offering and how to participate in it. It turns out that to buy their stock in the IPO, one needs a bidder ID. Possessing a Bidder ID allows (but does not require) one to place bids with their broker and to receive an allocation of shares based on that bid. Larry Page:
"As we embarked on the process of going public we started to look at the ways in which people actually do the offering. And one thing weâre interested in is making the process more democratic; making our shares available to more investors and to do that in sort of a rational way that would work. And this led us naturally to pursue an auction-based IPO which, although unusual in the United States, has been used in other countries more. And, itâs something that weâre hopeful that will work well and will serve both the Company and the investor, as well.
For the vast majority of IPO's, shares are allocated by the underwriters to brokers, and those brokers in turn allocate shares to their favorite clients (read 'those who already have big juicy balances in their accounts), making the purchase of shares impossible for the little guy until they start to trade on the open market. Google vows to be different.
"Bidding in our Auction:
- To participate, contact your brokerage firm affiliated with one of our underwriters, give them your bidder ID and let them know how many shares you want to bid for and at what price. Depending on your brokerage firm, you can do this in person, by phone, over the Internet or by fax, just as you would with any other stock purchase."
How much to offer? Well, the Iowa Electronic Marketplace may offer some guidance.
Google to Debut Between $108 and $135 a Share
The Web search giant will list shares of its Class A common stock on the Nasdaq under the symbol "GOOG."
Don't do it. Look at the chart of Akamai after its IPO first.
[Via NYT Technology]
Seth Dillingham has made my investing research a little easier. Ridiculously easy, actually. As I've written before, I use Robert Sheard's The Unemotional Investor as the basis for my stock picks. This requires that, on a regular basis, I enter 100 stock symbols into a spread sheet from one web site (Value Line), then look up two pieces of data for each stock from another web site (Investor's Business Daily). (Both are subscription-only, in case you're wondering.) Tedious, but worth it.
Using perl and MySQL, Seth provided a system which automatically looks up what the 100 symbols are, grabs the other data I need, then dumps them into a MySQL database. This gives me the data that was taking me the better part of an hour to get before, in under 2 minutes. But wait, there's more! Since it's in a relational database (MySQL is a free, open source relational database), once I get several time points in, I can begin to ask for more detailed information like "which of these 100 most timely stocks has had an increase in relative strength rating over a certain time period?"
Asking Seth to set this up for me means I get a professionally done system that works, thereby saving myself countless hours of hacking away with a product which no doubt wouldn't even come close to the quality of his work. It also give me a good starting point to learn more about relational databases in general, MySQL in particular, and maybe al little perl and cgi, too.