[pavlov]

It's always seemed strange to me that IPOs are not open to the public in the US. Is it some kind of Great Depression legacy?

Here in Finland IPOs have been open since at least the '80s, or maybe always... In the original dot-com hype days of 1999, there would be long queues in front of banks as the "Joe Publics" wanted to put their money into IT stocks that were mostly crap ISPs or web design consultancies. All those stocks crashed hard a year later, of course. (But then again, you wouldn't have been much better off investing in the "big and established winners" like Nokia, which peaked at around 90€ and later traded at below 2€ in the darkest post-Symbian days.)

[rdl]

There was actually a really interesting experiment at the tail end of the dotcom boom -- the WR+Hambrecht (San Francisco) "OpenIPO". Essentially it was a dutch auction (I think) for IPO shares, and open to the public. Google was the big success.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenIPO

VA Linux did some interesting stuff with their IPO (so did RedHat, I think), where community members got access above what the public received, too.

[bwhite]

You are describing a Direct Public Offering [0], which was widely used in the US in the 19th century but waned in the 20th.

Loyal3 does not appear to be underwriting GoPro's IPO. If they are being traditionally underwritten, some other syndicate is doing that and a select fraction of their clients are getting the IPO price. Loyal3 is apparently merely including it -- immediately, on the IPO day -- in the list of securities it permits its clients to transact in. Many brokers, including discount brokers, will do this. Also, it looks like Loyal3 does dollar-based investing. That is, you specify how many USDs you want to spend and Loyal3 eventually delivers some quantity of the security in exchange for those dollars. If you expect a stock's price and availability to fluctuate significantly on its IPO day, you may find that you get a lot less for your dollar that you thought you would.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_public_offering

[wmil]

They want to protect casual investors from con men. Finland is likely small enough that you can easily verify people through social and family connections. In the US it's quite common to go into business deals where you know almost nothing about the individual.