Won’t invest in over-valued IPOs: Zerodha’s Kamath

What happens when an IPO frenzy sucks out $3.7 billion (₹27,417 crore) in just six months? The answer according to Nikhil Kamath, co-founder, Zerodha and True Beacon, is—collateral damage. Not just for the secondary market but also retail investors. “When an IPO is subscribed 40-50 times, while it might sound like a good thing in the news, a certain amount of money has to get blocked for every single person who has subscribed. That liquidity is going away from a market that is already strapped for liquidity,” says Kamath in an interview to Fortune India.

It’s not just liquidity that rankles the 34-year-old and India’s youngest billionaire but the fact that retail investors are getting allured by listing gains. Kamath feels that in a majority of IPOs, retail investors will be left holding the can. “IPOs are, typically, a time when all savvy investors are offloading what they bought historically to the retail public of the country.”