Retail Brokerage Tells IPO-Hungry Clients: Buy Our Stock First
- Kazakhstan’s Freedom offers some customers bigger allocations
- Broker’s stock surge has made its founder a billionaire
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A Kazakhstan-based broker is riding the twin wave of retail investing and the frenzy around U.S. stock listings like Beyond Meat Inc. and Zoom Video Communications Inc. to drum up demand for its own shares.
Freedom Holding Corp. is offering clients across the former Soviet Union access to the hottest initial public offerings. But the price for a higher allocation is buying stock in the brokerage as well. The more Freedom shares they purchase, the more they can get in a popular IPO, according to marketing documents obtained by Bloomberg and interviews with investors.