Evaluation of initial public offerings on the bourse: An application on Stock Exchange Istanbul

Companies need financial resources to grow and improve themselves. One of the methods to provide financial resources for companies is to offer their shares to the public. However, according to the literature, there is underpricing in the initial public offerings (IPOs). Especially the initial day underpricing is a globally accepted phenomenon. The aims of this study are to measure whether there is initial day or short-term underpricing in IPOs stocks in Borsa Istanbul after the 2008 Global Financial Crisis and to measure the level of activity of Borsa Istanbul. In the study, the initial day and short term abnormal returns of 109 companies, offered to the public for the first time between 2010 and 2017 were examined by using the 'event study' method and the significance levels of these returns were tested. Within this scope, the initial day and short term (over 15 trading days) of the IPO stocks were examined. Additionally, these 109 companies were tested on the basis of years, sectors, intermediation for public offerings, public offering methods, market values of the companies, stocks traded in the hot / cold markets. As a result of the study, the average initial day return of all companies is 1.59%, the cumulative abnormal return at the 15th day is 4.59% and both returns are statistically significant at 1%. Therefore, both the initial day and short-term underpricing are available for the stocks. In addition, the first-day and short-term performances of the publicly traded shares differ from each other on the basis of the sub-categories mentioned above. The results indicate that Borsa Istanbul is not a semi-efficient market as it is possible to obtain a return above the market return by investing in the IPO stocks. Keywords Initial Public Offering (IPO), Underpricing, Borsa Istanbul