Simple, practical explainers on the stock market, IPOs and investing.
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90 articles
When you apply for an Indian IPO, the application money does not leave your bank account. It is marked and held there until the allotment is known. This article explains what blocking means at the bank, why the system was designed this way, and what an applicant should watch for.
Applying for an IPO through a broker means typing a UPI ID into a bid form and then approving a request on your phone. Between those two actions sits a chain of intermediaries. This article follows the instruction from the bid screen to your bank and back, and shows where it breaks.
Shortly before an Indian IPO opens for public bidding, a separate book is filled and closed by large institutions in one session, and the allotment is disclosed to the exchanges. This note explains who anchor investors are, why that round exists, how it is priced and locked in, and what a retail reader can fairly conclude.
Every mainboard IPO in India divides its shares among qualified institutional buyers, non-institutional investors and retail individual investors, with each group bidding into its own reserved pool. This article explains who belongs where, why the reservation exists, how the rules differ between categories, and why demand is reported separately for each.
When an issue is reported as subscribed a certain number of times, that figure is a simple ratio of shares bid for to shares offered. This article works through the arithmetic, separates the overall multiple from the category-wise ones, and shows exactly how a subscription number translates into allotment probability.
Every IPO subscription figure is one division: shares bidders asked for, divided by shares offered to that group. This guide unpacks what sits in each half of that fraction, why the category rows must be read separately, how demand builds across bidding days, and which readings of the table are simply wrong.
Between the moment bidding closes and the day a stock lists, a registrar has to match millions of bids against bank confirmations, throw out the ones that fail, allocate what is left bucket by bucket, and run a draw of lots where retail demand exceeds supply. This is what happens in those few days.
A few days after an IPO closes, the registrar files a document called the Basis of Allotment. It is short, unglamorous and the only official explanation of why you received one lot, three lots or nothing at all. This guide walks through its tables column by column and shows how to trace a single application through them.
An IPO allotment result is produced by the issue registrar and then mirrored by exchanges, brokers, depositories and banks. This guide explains the identifiers you need, the three practical routes for checking, what each possible result means, and why a blank search often has nothing to do with rejection.
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