On it’s website, SEBI has released an excellent “Guide to understand and Offer Document” and instantly has also made it so difficult to find that one needs a “Guide to navigate the SEBI web site”, which is also a Ph.D. qualification in most colleges.
The guide is good – but doesn’t tallk about the getcha’s in the offer document itself – like how to make sense of the craziness of subsidiaries, or why they put "[*]” in places like EPS because of silly excuses like we don’t know the price yet, or how to read the fundamental information. Fair enough. That isn’t a SEBI education book, it’s a college course in itself.
The guide tells you how you can invest, where you can get copies of the offer document, how does Book Building work (they stop short of: No, it doesn’t) and how long it takes for allocation/listing. Useful starting point.
Offer documents are also available at merchant banker web sites. By the way, you may not know this, but once the issue is over, you can get the END copy of the Offer document to see how the [*] areas eventually got filled in, by looking at the “Final Offer Documents filed with ROC”.
I wrote a small piece years back (“What to look for in an Offer Document”) which only talks of a few red flags.
Note: I started writing this article reading Hindu’s note about it – and then noting they hadn’t linked to the SEBI guide. Why? Why do online editions of newspapers just not get it? (Apart from LiveMint, that is. They get it. For the most part.)
