3 ms·

Alibaba sold a hell of a lot more than 0.1% of itself today. About 125 times that number. And the price wasn't driven to zero. There's a lot more depth in US eq

• imaginenore 12y ago
  IPO is a special event. You can't compare it to a regular stock state.
  • arfliw 12y ago
    You are technically correct that you can't just login to your broker one day and dump 5% onto the market - but there are ways to sell that amount of stock without crashing the price. A Secondary Offering is one way. It's basically doing an IPO over again but for an already public company. You can also sell directly to hedge funds/mutual funds etc. They have the opposite problem, wanting to acquire a large stake but being unable to because submitting an order for 0.1% would send the price to infinity.
  • harryh 12y ago
    1) First off, what's so different about an IPO? The road show? Please. Investors aren't plunking down ~20B for a piece of Alibaba 'cause of a slick powerpoint presentation. 2) Secondly, companies routinely do secondary sales in which they sell stakes of themselves far in excess of 0.1%.
    • adventured 12y ago
      Secondary offerings are not routine for any given business, even if they occur regularly in the broad market among thousands of companies. It's rare for a company to do a secondary offering.
• malchow 12y ago
  "There's a lot more depth in US equities markets than you think." That's a keeper! Liquidity is a high-velocity component to markets. There's more depth that the sub-OP credits the market with at the present instant. But it really can disappear fast. I think there's actually a lot less depth to US equities than most people think, over the long run.