The Slack Technologies application is displayed on an Apple iPhone in an arranged photograph taken in Arlington, Virginia on Monday, April 29, 2019.Workplace-messaging firm Slack is about to go public in a red-hot IPO market, but it's approach to going public — using a "direct listing" — is slightly different than an IPO.went public using the same method.
There was effectively no lock-up period. The fear was that insiders would dump the stock en masse on the first day, leading to chaos.Neither concern proved to be a major issue. Instead of an initial price that underwriters set to sell stock, Spotify and its advisors set a "reference price" of $132 that was roughly based on recent private trades. Spotify opened at $165.90 and closed at $149 on its first day of trading, up about 12 percent.
, a basket of roughly the last 60 large IPOs, estimates that 283 million of the 599 million shares outstanding will be available to trade .