Hi guys,
I am having a very hard time trying to figure out how to do something relating to IPO trades.
Let’s say I have $100,000.
I know there will be 2 IPOs tomorrow morning, and I know the symbols. The IPOs have priced, but not traded yet.
I want to buy $50,000 of each of them at whatever price they open at.
How do I acheive this?
I could use a limit order but the problem is that I don’t know what the opening trade will be. Say the stock XYZ is priced at $10 and I use a limit of $20. I would then put in a limit order for 2500 shares. Now the stock opens at $12, and the limit is triggered, so I have now bought 2500 shares at $12 for $30,000 worth. I still need to buy another $20,000 worth. But I have to be awake and on the gun to buy the stock, and I probably will have missed the opening price.
Someone suggested using OCA orders, so I set up an Interactive Brokers account. I entered various orders and made One Cancel All. But the problem is IB requires you to post margin for each trade, even though it isn’t live. So that’s impossible unless you had a lot more money than you wanted to trade. In this case I want to trade as much as I have.
Does anybody have any ideas?
Thank you!
Also wondering how orders in the context of IPOS work on C2. Hows it been working?
You can work around it via the API - don’t think you can do it otherwise. The biggest issue is they don’t start trading with the other stocks @ 9.30 eastern time - they may open at 10, 11.43 … it is very unpredictable.
If you trade via the API you can get the quotes starting from 9.30 and once you have a valid bid/ask/last you can basically issue the trade (at that time you also know how much to invest). Just be prepared for crazy wide bid/ask spreads in the first couple of minutes.
