Freedom Holding Corp (FRHC)

[Quintessence]

Bloomberg: a popular broker among Russians promises clients the best conditions for participation in an IPO for the purchase of its shares

https://www.bfm.ru/news/465971

The increased interest in investments and the boom in IPOs of well-known American companies played into the hands of all brokers. But, as Bloomberg noted, Freedom Finance has found its own approach to increase capitalization in this situation. Clients are offered participation in the sensational IPOs, and the best conditions from those who bought shares of the broker itself.

Apparently, this is bearing fruit. Since October 2019, when the company listed its shares on NASDAQ, it has more than quadrupled in price, capitalization exceeding $ 3 billion. This is one of the sharpest ups among all financial companies, the agency said. The number of clients has also grown dramatically - to almost 230 thousand. Most of them are from Russia and the countries of the former Soviet Union. At the same time, the scale of Freedom Finance's business in Russia is clearly more modest: the number of registered clients on the Moscow Exchange is about 100 thousand.

“If demand for stocks were similarly stimulated directly in the US, it would raise serious questions,” Charles Whitehead, professor of business law at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, told Bloomberg. Other participants are also using a selective approach, Timur Turlov, founder and main shareholder of Freedom Finance, is sure.

Timur Turlov, founder and main shareholder of Freedom Finance “Brokerage companies and an investment bank look at what types of clients behave and what they do, and, as a rule, try to give more shares to those clients who bring them more business: they trade more actively with them, hold a fairly wide portfolio, pay them more commissions. And we do the same. Our shareholders can indeed get some marginal advantage. There are no hard and fast rules, there are only principles that we inform clients about and which we pay attention to when allocating allocations. This is not a prohibited practice, this is the only way it works all over the world. You will hardly find a single large investment bank in the world whose clients would receive equal allocation. "