Free Ride

The initial public offering (IPO) of Alibaba Group Ltd. (BABA), the huge Chinese Internet company, has made quite a few investors quite a bit of money ... and I don't even mean the venture capitalists and other initial and mezzanine investors like Yahoo. I mean those people and companies who were allocated stock in the initial distribution this morning at $68 per share. They then had opportunities to sell this stock for as much as $99.70 per share after the stock started trading about noon today at $92.70. During my days on Wall Street, selling an IPO during its first trading day used to be called a "free ride."

The size of this initial offering was 320.1 million shares and the total volume for this first trading day totaled over 271 million shares. This means that it is possible that many of those who received their shares on the original allocation had a opportunity to sell them for at least a $24.70 per share profit to as much as $31.70 per share profit ... meaning that those who were lucky enough to get these allocations were wealthier (on paper anyway) by at least $7.91 billion ... possibly more. Not bad! Basically all this wealth was just created out of thin air. One clever author call this IPO-created magical wealth, Supermoney ... see: Amazon Listing.

To me, this suggests that all this monetary gas may keep the stock market inflated for a while yet. To read more about this IPO and Alibaba itself read: Marketwatch Writeup.

Afterthought: Thinking about this IPO further, I may have stumbled upon the fundamental advantage of capitalism ... super wealth creation. Such things just don't happen under those economies of the commonwealth variety. Perhaps that is why the U.S. keeps winning despite all our screw-ups?