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How to Buy IPO's

Hi, I'm new to quantopian and have spent a few hours going through the documentation to try and figure out how I could do a backtest of buying a stock during the first minute of trading after an ipo. I understand if you're using the "universal" method for selecting your stock universe it doesn't include the stock until after the first day of the IPO. Any ideas of how I could do it?

2 responses

Hi Eric - the set_universe() command updates the universe every 3 months, so you're pretty much never going to capture an IPO that way.

We don't track new IPOs in our database (at least not yet). What I suggest you do is find a list of IPOs - SEC filings or whatever - and put them in a CSV. You can then import that data using Fetcher and test it that way.

If you get close to live-trading this strategy, let me know. We have an open issue where you can't easily trade stocks on the first day of the IPO. It should be fixed fairly soon, but just in case. . .

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okay, no worries, this is a rare situation anyway