When is an IPO considered failure?
Different stakeholders have different views of 'failure'. Maybe from Air Berlin's point of view it was a failure, but technically speaking it is not really possible to 'fail'. As long as all shares were purchased, which is a virtual guarantee since the investment banks who underwrite the IPO by and large must do to some extent, it will always be 'successful'. A decrease in value of shares immediately after IPO means that the investment bank who did the IPO for Air Berlin didn't match its IPO price with market expectations, causing shorts on the stock, and thus a decline. No failure per se. "Just skimming through the Wikipedia article on airberlin, I notice there is more to the story than simply ""airberlin's IPO failed, so they postponed it and did it anyways."" 3 points to keep in mind about IPOs:  1) An IPO is the mechanism for taking a private company and setting it up for shares to be owned by ""the public"".  2) The process of selling shares to the public often allows original owners and/or early investors to ""cash out"". Most countries (including member nations of the EU) limit some transactions like pre-IPO companies to ""accredited investors"".  3) Selling shares to the public also can allow the company to access more funds for growth. This is particularly important in a capital-intensive business like an airline; new B737-MAX costs >$110M. New A320neo costs >$105M USD.  Ultimately, the question of a successful IPO depends on how you define success. Initially, there was a lot of concern that the IPO was set up with too much focus on goal #2... allowing the management & owners to cash out.  It looks like the first approach was not meeting good opinions in the market during 2006. A major concern was that the initial approach focused on management only cashing out its shares and no money actually going to the company to support its future.  The investment bankers restructured the IPO, including the issuance of more new shares so that more $ could end up in the company's accounts, not just in the accounts of the management.  If anything, it's still a pretty successful IPO given that the shares were successfully listed, the company collected the money it needed to invest and grow, and the management still cashed out."
I didn't say only the IPO I just said public offerings. Trades between secondary investors would be taxed at a higher level. I also understand the difference between loaning money to a company and investing in equity.  Personally I think that loans are underused in today's investment world because people are too focused on getting the most out of the few big winners. In all honesty, if they truly need the funding, they didn’t have a choice unless they could get one of their strategics to pony up more money. It’s either raise capital from PE or IPO at that point. They’re not going to get a third strategic in the door, especially at that valuation. You cannot trade in pre-IPO shares of companies like Facebook without being an accredited investor. If a website or company doesn't mention that requirement, they are a scam. A legitimate market for private shares is SecondMarket. Thanks chrissundberg for providing the outline of the JOBS Act. Under the current rules, my understanding is that a non-public company can have up to 35 unaccredited investors, which doesn't really work within a crowdfunding environment. Am I correct in that? Yes, that is correct. There is no limit.  An initial public offering of common stock by a company means that these shares remain outstanding for as long as the company wishes. The exceptions are through corporate actions, most commonly either That's the problem with IPOs. Professionals are very bad at valuing companies, particularly prospectively. That's Daniel Kahneman's whole point about how no one beats the market. Yet, we expect the same types of professionals who can't beat the market to set the price for the market. That's because they literally could not help you. It's not that they were just unwilling to. A hedge fund manager might be able to do it, because the person who bet on Facebook would be willing to let him borrow their shares.  An IPO in explain like I'm five:  A bank helps underwrite the shares pre offering. This means they buy the shares wholesale. They buy a large majority of the company in order to offer them to the public when the stock goes public. The bank does this for profit, the company does this become it helps raise their price. The bank that underwrites the stock is legally prohibited from short selling that stock for ***at least***  30 days before the IPO. This is to prevent the bank from trying to commit fraud by selling stock out the front door and betting against it out the back.   ***  So, now let's jump forward to the day of the IPO. The bank is offering stock to everyone who wants to buy it (other banks who will cut it up and sell it to more people). In order to short the stock someone must be willing to let you borrow their shares. Only the bank that underwrote it prohibited from short selling. It's possible but hard. The underwriter has the majority of the shares for the first thirty days anyways. They're just going to release enough of them to raise volume on the ticker symbol (volume is the amount of people buying and selling). The others the underwriter sold to are unwilling to let someone borrow their stock because they want to ride the price hike and shares are in short supply. So while it's possible to short shares, it's very hard. The underwriters limit the supply of shares to prevent that from happening. The underwriters can't just let you short their own shares because they are legally prohibited from it.   Basically, you're left with the fact that the only person who has enough supply to let you short, is prohibited by law from letting you do it. I'm sure Morgan Stanley would have been happy to let their customers short Facebook (as long as you did it through them) to hedge their bets. But they can't. "Check your broker's IPO list. Adding a new stock to a stock exchange is called ""Initial Public Offering"" (IPO), and most brokers have a list of upcoming IPO's in which their clients can participate." &gt; I still think there should be some kind of rule in place that an IPO has to reflect a companies actual value.   The value of a company is it's price. Really hard to determine that beforehand. ∑(assets) doesn't determine the value of a company (otherwise most software companies would be near valueless) Some brokers have a number of shares they can offer their customers, but the small guy will get 100, not as many as they'd like. In the Tech bubble of the late 90's I was able to buy in to many IPOs, but the written deal from the broker is that you could not sell for 30 days or you'd be restricted from IPO purchases for the next 90. No matter what the stock opened at, there were a fair number of stocks thay were below IPO issue price after 30 days had passed. I haven't started looking at IPOs since the tech flameout, but had I gotten in to LinkedIn it would have been at that $45 price. Let's see if it stays at these levels after 30 days.  Edit - This is the exact cut/paste from my broker's site :  Selling IPO Shares: While XXX customers are always free to sell shares purchased in a public offering at any time, short holding periods of less than 31 calendar days will be a factor in determining whether XXX allocates you shares in future public offerings. Accordingly, if you sell IPO shares purchased in a public offering within 30 calendar days of such purchase, you will be restricted from participating in initial and secondary public offerings through XXX for a period of 3 months.  (I deleted the broker name) I honestly don't know if I'd have gotten any LI shares. Next interesting one is Pandora. It's generally the hype that blinds them. Unfortunately, as rare as it happens on the scale of the FB IPO - it shouldn't happen at all. But then again, if everyone was well educated, informed and risk averse - we wouldn't have losers in the market. Everyone can't keep winning forever! Only on an accounting basis. The moment they start selling, it would plunge. Take a look at all the small float tech IPOs. Big pop, but once the lockup period ends, it drops 50% as insiders sell. In the end, fundamentals will rule. Facebook managed to unload a quarter of the company at the vastly inflated $38, which is very impressive. The other tech IPOs typically sell less than 10%, because selling more would lead to very low share prices. Remember, these guys are not retail investors selling 100 shares. The ticker shows the price of the last block of shares that was traded, but when someone tries to sell a couple million shares, then it will plunge. In my original question, I  was wondering if there was a mathematical convention to help in deciding on whether an equity offering OR debt offering would be a better choice. I should have clarified better in the question, I used Vs. which may have made it unclear. OK, were there any fund managers stupid enough to bet on Facebook? If there are, they should all be out of jobs by now. (They won't be, but they should.)  Facebook was a bad investment on paper, on hype, and on fundamentals. There was no reasonable expectation of it going up on IPO. "Fail? What is the standard? If you include the base case of keeping your money under a mattress, then you only have to earn a $1 over your lifetime of investing to not fail. What about making more by investing when compared to keeping money in a checking or savings account? How could 90% of investors fail to achieve these standards? Update: with the hint from the OP to google ""90% investors lose their money"" it is clear that ""experts"" on complex trading systems are claiming that the 90% of the people that try similar systems, fail to make money. Therefore try their system, for a fee. The statements are being made by people who have what should be an obvious bias."