Use Google Alerts to track your IPOs

My posts on IPOs usually bring a few questions about when the company will be listed on the stock exchange and start trading.

In the case of mutual fund NFOs, you can take a look at what the reopen date will be, and normally this is the date that you can expect the mutual fund to start trading.

However, in the case of IPOs, the trading date is not always decided before hand, and investors need to keep an eye out for the trading dates.

Setting up Google Alerts is very helpful to do this.

For example, if you have invested in the Adani Power IPO, you will be interested in its allotment and listing date.

If you have a Gmail account, go to Google Alerts and login. If you don’t have a Gmail account, then get one first.

Once you login, you will see the following screen. Type in “Adani power allotment date” and create a new alert.

On the next screen, click “New” and enter a few variations like “Adani Allotment”, “Adani Listing Date” etc. At the end of every day, you will get an email which has a snippet of everything that was published on the web the prior day, and had your keywords.

The articles you receive may not have the exact phrase that you set the alert for, so you will get more stories than you wanted, but if you set it up for once a day, they will all come in one email.

You can browse through this email and see if the listing date or allotment date has been announced. This is an efficient and easy way to track listing and allotment dates online.

This can also be used if you want to track a certain IPO, and what people are saying about it. So for example, if you plan to invest in the NHPC IPO, and are interested in what people are saying about it, set up an alert for NHPC IPO too.

I know a lot of people use Google Alerts to track information about every stock or mutual fund that they are invested in. I personally don’t do that, but you could try it out to see if it interests you. I’d be interested to hear if you know any other ways to track allotment and listing dates, and also the other uses you find for Google Alerts.