Investors can gain broad exposure to the stock market’s latest offerings through initial public offering exchange traded funds, but they may not enjoy the first-day pop.
ETF offerings target the new-to-market discovery period of an IPO stock – the time after the price settles and before it is fully incorporated into the market, reports Ashley Lau for Reuters.
Passive ETF’s underlying indices follow entry rules to determine when a new IPO stock can be added. The Global X Social Media Index ETF (NasdaqGS: SOCL) added Facebook (NasdaqGM: FB) after the company was listed for five days, and Global X plans to do the same for Twitter. SOCL was previously dubbed the “Facebook ETF” because the fund was the first ETF to add Facebook to its holdings. [Twitter IPO Icing on the Cake for Social Media ETF]
Some ETFs can wait for quarterly rebalances to add a stock. For instance, the First Trust US IPO Index Fund (NYSEArca: FPX) waited about four months before adding FB. FPX tries to reflect the performance of the IPOX Global Composite Index, which is a rules based value-weighted index measuring the average performance of U.S. IPOs during the first 1,000 trading days and selects the 100 largest, best performing and most liquid IPOs.
Taking a closer look at FPX’s holdings, index components include spinoffs – a new company created through the sale of distribution of new shares on an existing firm, companies that have gone public after recovering from bankruptcy and formerly public firms that were privatized in private equity buyouts only to be taken public again a few years later. [Good Picks or Good Luck: Spin-Off ETF Still Soars]