When you vacation in a quiet place that’s far away from the city, with no connectivity, you tend to marvel at the simplicity of life. India’s IPO market is like that, simple, unbothered by the chaos and malaise afflicting the secondary market at the moment. Meanwhile, investors, analysts and even journalists assess macros, micros, stocks, and fret over earnings, trade wars, wars, straits that are blocked and what not to guesstimate the direction of equity markets.
But leave that chaos behind and come to the idyllic isle of IPOs. All you need to read is one document. If you can’t do that labour, there’s enough material that’s easily available online to read. If that’s also difficult, then there are readily available signals, even if dubious, such as grey market premiums, anchor investor pedigrees, oversubscription frenzies, finfluencer recommendations and so on. If you apply and get a share allotment, wait for the listing pop and exit. If you don’t get shares, queue up for the next issue. If you get shares and it’s a listing dud, then try your luck at the next one.
Eventually, of course, these IPOs will turn into secondary market listings that investors will assess along with their already-listed peers. On that side, the chaos is only growing, week after week.
This week, the Nifty is set to close with a loss of 2.1 percent over previous Friday’s close. The Nifty is down by 4.5 percent over a week -- nearly half of that decline happened in this week alone.
The Middle-East conflict is not only deepening, but also widening. The Houthis have taken positions in the Mocha port in Yemen, giving them the ability to choke the Bab al-Mandeb Strait -- a crucial shipping corridor for crude and commodities. This comes even as the Strait of Hormuz got affected as the US and Iran launched attacks on tankers they considered hostile. Brent crude has comfortably crossed the $100 a barrel levels and reached as high as $110 a barrel, before declining in the latter part of Friday, September 11. Two crucial shipping routes at risk will likely keep crude on the boil.