Some are calling brokers they haven’t spoken to in ages, while others are scrambling to remember how to put money into their trading accounts.
For brokers accustomed to years of lackluster trading and thin volumes, the flood of inquiries is raising hopes that GCash, the country’s biggest digital payments platform, could rekindle appetite for stocks beyond the blockbuster listing.
Old friends, fresh money
“At first, demand was weak and not everyone wanted shares. But when the price was set at P6.60, interest picked up, and suddenly even people who weren’t my regular clients, including an old friend, were calling and asking for shares,” a broker told InsiderPH.
“There’s those who don’t trade very often who wanted shares and then there were some who sold shares specifically to buy GCash,” the broker added.
Another broker told InsiderPH that a client traveling overseas secured a decent allocation of shares of GCash, operated by Mynt Inc., but forgot how to fund the trading account despite having done it before.
GCash fever spreads
The excitement is visible on GCash’s own app, where GStocks PH, powered by AB Capital Securities, gives ordinary users a way to subscribe to the IPO.
Even before the offer closed, demand through GStocks PH had reached three times its available allocation.
The demand frenzy stands in sharp contrast to the broader market, where the PSE index has fallen about 6 percent since the start of the year, weighed down by a sharp economic slowdown and the US-Iran war.
Big demand, bigger questions
GCash, whose rise was backed by Ayala-led Globe Telecom and China’s Ant Group, is bringing investors back to the market, but the enthusiasm does not necessarily mean its shares are a bargain at the IPO price.
Abacus Securities, whose research team is led by veteran analyst Nicky Franco, said the P6.60 offer price, first reported by InsiderPH, was already close to what the company was worth.
The report was dated Sept. 25, while GCash’s IPO was priced on Oct. 1 this year.
“[F]or those who do believe in the bullish case, our advice is to keep the position small. In our view, there is plenty of time to increase exposure given the potential selling in April when most of the locked-up shares become freely tradable,” Abacus said in the report.
When IPOs could do no wrong
Joseph Roxas, president of Eagle Equities, told InsiderPH that excitement hasn’t been this high since Cemex Holdings Philippines listed on the Philippine Stock Exchange a decade ago.
“Cemex locally was quite hot,” he said, comparing the retail excitement around GCash to an earlier era when IPOs routinely delivered gains for investors.
“Back then, practically every IPO would go up, so everybody wanted in. But this was followed by a portion of the cycle where all IPOs would go down,” Roxas, a former director of the PSE, explained.
Cemex itself failed to deliver for investors and was eventually sold to the Consunji family and renamed Concreat Holdings.
A make-or-break moment for stocks
That business and those circumstances were different, but Roxas hopes GCash’s growth story—which has slowed in recent quarters following the removal of direct links to online gambling—will still hold up.
“The public is here. Retail is here. I want this one to fly or the market is dead again,” he said.
Miguel R. Camus has been a reporter covering various domestic business topics since 2009.
