The turmoil at the secondary market failed to affect the spirit of retail investors in the primary market though they remained lukewarm to Indian Oil Corporation’s offer for sale on Black Monday.

The IPOs of Shree Pushkar Chemicals and Fertilizers and Pennar Engineered Building Systems (PEBS) managed to get subscribed fully on Thursday. However, the subscription patterns in the three recent IPOs show that small investors are not investing blindly in the primary market.

For instance, in the public issue of Shree Pushkar, the retail investors portion got subscribed 1.53 times, even though qualified institutional buyers showed limited interest, under-subscribing their portion at 0.97 times. Corporates and high net worth individuals (HNIs), however, showed bigger interest, subscribing nearly three times to their portion that helped the issue receive overall bids of 1.34 times.

The ₹600-crore logistics firm Navkar Corp issue was subscribed 2.84 times despite a drastic beginning to the trading week. Retail investors bought 1.6 times into the portion reserved for them.

But, small investors were a lot more careful on PEBS, where the retail portion saw only 40 per cent subscription. Corporates and HNIs subscribed 1.44 times while the bulk of subscription participation came from qualified institutional buyers, who offered to buy 2.2 times of their reserved portion.

The biggest surprise, however, was the OFS by the government in Indian Oil Corporation. The retail investor portion got bids only for 88.87 lakh as against the 4.85 crore shares reserved for them.

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