[mruts]

Ignoring the huge black swan event in your data (the tech crash), the point of getting in on an IPO isn't for you to hold it 3 years.

You get allocated shares that you then sell before the lockup period for everyone else expires. It's just risk-free money for the people that are friends with the underwriters.

I don't have the data on me, but I bet if you got into every IPO from 1980 through 2001 and then sold after one month, your returns would be pretty damn good.

[andrewmcwatters]

"And finance professors Jay Ritter and William Schwert have shown that if you had spread a total of only $1,000 across every IPO in January 1960, at its offering price, sold out at the end of that month, then invested anew in each successive month’s crop of IPOs, your portfolio would have been worth more than $533 decillion ($533,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) by year-end 2001."

"Unfortunately, for every IPO like Microsoft that turns out to be a big winner, there are thousands of losers."

"You could have earned that $533 decillion gain only if you never missed a single one of the IPO market’s rare winners—a practical impossibility."