No, not that way. Not the way some folks reading this might think. The other way.
Sure, one understanding of whether an IPO is “perfectly priced” would be that it has the right value of the company. You know, something like the unimpeachably accurate pricing of all of the future income flows of the enterprise discounted forward to today, or something.
But the other way that the pricing can be correct is that the company accurately predicted what price The Market would be willing to offer for the slice of the company being sold to The Market. IOW, that the price they sold to all the folks who were allocated shares in the IPO would end up being, in retrospect, the price that they would have chosen to list at if they had perfect information about demand for the security. The company may have its own idea of what the right share price should be. But they don’t know if it’s correct.
Most IPOs use their roadshow as a vehicle for price discovery. They spend quite a lot of time trying to figure out the right price.
SpaceX was interesting because it did not do that. They chose their opening price some time ago, before the roadshow. $135 per share. Without having the benefit of the roadshow to see if that price was too low (and thus leave money on the table), or too high (and thus miss the right-sized IPO “pop” that you look for). Writing about it yesterday, columnist Matt Levine noted a lot of ways that Space X was able to get pricing information before the roadshow, and that yesterday it looked like they were likely to get it right:
There are also betting markets, where people trade not SpaceX stock but rather bets on the future price of SpaceX stock. We talked last week about pre-IPO perpetual futures, which are essentially crypto-based betting markets on SpaceX’s stock price. These exist in a somewhat gray area legally, and are not generally available to US investors, but so what. CNBC reported yesterday:
Crypto traders in the SpaceX pre-IPO perpetual futures are expecting a big first day for Elon Musk’s much-hyped space company.
The perpetual future contract is currently trading around $162 on the Hyperliquid trading platform, a market dominated by highly active, leverage-seeking crypto traders. That’s about 20% above its fixed IPO price of $135 per share, but down sharply from the peak levels exceeding $220, reached shortly after its May launch. SpaceX perpetual futures on Binance were trading at a similar level.
A perfect 20% IPO pop.
Money Stuff: SpaceX Priced Already | NewsletterHunt
SpaceX closed today up 19.22% from the offering. They priced it perfectly.