Ultimately, 'the opening public price of our common stock on the NYSE will be determined by buy and sell orders collected by the NYSE from broker-dealers,' says Roblox, and will be set by a 'designated market maker' working in consultation with Roblox's financial advisors Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley in the minutes before trading begins. How does a direct listing work in practice? So really, it's anybody's guess what price this stock will start trading at.

In its prospectus, Roblox refers to an 'independent common stock valuation report' that puts a price of $41.52 on the stock as of Dec. So how much will it cost you to get one of the Class A shares that are for sale? The most recent known private sale of a Class A share of Roblox cost its buyer $6.34 a share - but that was back in April 2020, when the market was just starting to recover from the coronavirus stock market crash. These shares represent 70.7% of all votes at the company - and are not up for sale.) (Roblox has another set of shares, Class B shares, that are owned by its founder and CEO David Baszucki. Because these are existing shares being sold by people who already own them, though, Roblox itself 'will not receive any proceeds from the sale.' In total, 196.7 million 'Class A' shares of Roblox may be up for grabs. So instead of using its IPO to raise cash, sometime in 'early February' Roblox will simply allow the people who currently own its shares to begin selling them to the public - at whatever price the market will bear.

After collecting the proceeds from its private placement, you can probably up that estimate to $1.3 billion. In fact, in its S-1 prospectus, Roblox advised that, as of the end of September 2020, it already had more than $800 million in cash in the bank. In an ordinary IPO, a company creates shares and sells them to the public to raise cash - and gets an accurate read on the value of its stock as a fringe benefit, 'seeing' for the first time what people are really willing to pay for them on the public market. As the company advised, instead of conducting an ordinary 'underwritten' IPO at a set offer price (the way most companies go public), Roblox will conduct a 'direct listing' of its shares - offering them to the public at whatever price investors are willing to pay. Then, two days later, Roblox amended its S-1 'going public' filing with the SEC. 6, the company conducted a private placement of stock, raising about $520 million in cash for itself. Earlier this month, Roblox finally came to a decision about how it would do that.

Roblox pre ipo