2011 Share Floats - What Will 2011 Hold For Investors In IPOs?

With the year now well underway, it's time to turn our attention to what the IPO market might throw our way in 2011. In terms of the number of new issues, last year was an improvement on 2009. Will 2011 be a better year again for investors in Australian share floats?

2010 saw 96 new listings worth a total of $7.5 billion. The monster float of the year was QR National. And despite some investor doubt in the run-up to the QRN share offer, the share price has actually performed fairly well. Shares are trading at $2.80 as I write this, which is a reasonable premium to the $2.45 paid by retail investors. Of course such short term price movement is likely to be driven more by sentiment than by fundamentals. The real test for QR National will be the next couple of years operating results.

QRN - QR National Share Offer Document Now Available

Finally the big day for prospective QR National investors has arrived. The offer document has been released and now we get a chance to see what the 'big' fuss has all been about (don't tell me you haven't seen the ads). What follows are some of the highlights from the QR National prospectus.

How Much?

The indicative price range is between $2.50 and $3.00 per share with the final price paid by institutions (fund managers and the like) to be set by way of an institutional book build (kind of like an auction for the big boys). Retail investors will pay 10 cents per share less than the institutions up to a price of $2.80. I guess that means we will pay somewhere between $2.40 and $2.80 per share.

QR National Share Offer

Is it worth buying shares in the QR National float?

That is the $6.5 billion question. Unfortunately, we're all going to have to wait a little longer to find out. Until October 10 to be exact. That's when the prospectus is due to be released.

Although details of the QR share offer are still sketchy, most main-stream media are predicting a market capitalization once the listing takes place to be around 6.5 billion dollars, although the Queensland Government may retain between 25% and 40% ownership. If you do the maths, that's still a sizeable opportunity for Australian investors. In fact this will be the largest float this year and the second largest in Australian history.

Pre-Registration Now Open For QR National Shares

2010 Share Market Floats - What Can Investors Look Forward To?

What will 2010 deliver to Australian stock market investors when it comes to new share floats? Hopefully, the worst of the global financial crisis is now behind us. After a fairly slow year in terms of the number and size of Initial Public Offerings, companies which had temporarily put their share float plans on the back burner may now be taking a second look at the market.

I think one of the reasons that 2009 was such a bad year for new share floats was the amount of competition for investment dollars. Investors could snap up a bargain pretty much anywhere they cared to look in the first half of 2009 (provided they were looking - some investors were too scared to go anywhere near the stock market given the massive falls an 2008, which continued into the early part of 2009).