Bats surges 20% in its trading debut

bat bats baseball

(Reuters/John Sommers II)

Bats shares opened at $22.88 for trading on Friday, higher than the initial public offering price of $19 per share.

That took the stock up by as much as 21%.

America's second-largest stock-exchange operator is making its debut as a public company after a failed attempt in 2012.

Bats Global Markets withdrew its IPO after a software bug disrupted trading on its exchange.

On Thursday, Bats priced its IPO at $19 per share, the high end of the range of $17-$19. It sold 13.3 million shares, valuing it at $1.82 billion and making it the largest IPO of the year.

It was 20x oversubscribed, according to people familiar with the matter.

This has been the driest year for IPOs since the first quarter of 2009. Data from Dealogic shows that there were only nine IPOs in Q1, raising $1.2 billion. That's down from the $5.5 billion raised in the same period a year ago.

And so if Bats' IPO goes well, it could encourage more companies that have already filed to go public to proceed.

Bats is trading on its own Bats BZX Exchange with the ticker "BATS."

A bit more about the company: An investor presentation showed that it holds a 21.1% of the US equities market, versus Nasdaq's 18.8% share. In Europe, it's larger than the Deutsche Borse and London Stock Exchange, making it the largest exchange in Europe.

Here's a chart showing the stock's first day:

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(Yahoo Finance)

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