India's Biggest IPOs Looked Like Winners. Then Year Two Arrived.

Quick Summary: Of the 19 listed names among India's ten largest fresh-issue and ten largest OFS IPOs of October 2021 to October 2026, the average allottee beat the Nifty 50 TRI at three and six months, then fell 32.8 points behind it by year two. The median allottee is down 16.3 percent in total-return terms. Only six of 19 trade above their issue price.

Start with the result that survived every check we ran on the data: India's biggest IPOs beat the market first and lost to it later. Measured from each listing date against the Nifty 50 TRI, the average allottee across the mega-issues of the last five years was 11.3 points ahead of the index after three months and 13.1 points ahead after six. By the two-year mark the average excess had fallen to minus 32.8 points, and only two of the seven stocks old enough to have a full 24 months of history were still ahead. Hold the sample to those same seven names at every horizon and the bleed starts even earlier: ahead by 9.6 points at three months, behind by six. The median stock never beat the index at any horizon at all.

The timing matters because the popular story about IPO disappointment is a listing-day story: the pop, the fade, the angry first week. In this dataset the debuts were mostly fine. Sixteen of the 19 listed names closed their first trading day above the issue price, with an average listing gain of 14.6 percent. The damage showed up later and it compounded quietly, through drawdowns whose median reached 42.5 percent peak to trough.

Why the biggest deals pull in the most money

Large IPOs arrive with advantages small ones cannot buy. The issuer is usually a household name or a monopoly, the issue is impossible for institutional investors to ignore, and the media coverage does the marketing for free. Jio Platforms' ₹30,213 crore issue in October 2026, the largest in Indian market history, drew bids worth 22.19 times the shares on offer before listing on 28 October.

The subscription pattern in this dataset tells you how differently the market treated these names. Meesho's December 2025 issue was subscribed 81.76 times, Waaree Energies 76.34 times, LG Electronics India 54 times, SBI Funds Management 41.66 times. At the other end, Paytm managed 1.48 times, LIC 2.05 times, Tata Capital 1.95 times. Whatever else separated these IPOs, the crowd had already sorted them by enthusiasm long before the listing bell.

There is a second attraction that has less to do with the company and more to do with the game. A big IPO offers two distinct ways to win: an allotment at the issue price, or a fast listing pop. As we will see, these two paid out very differently.

What the money did after the bell

The universe is the ten largest fresh-issue IPOs and the ten largest OFS IPOs ranked by component size between 27 October 2021 and 27 October 2026, which produces 17 unique listed companies, plus the two tied-at-rank-11 fresh issues (Waaree Energies and Adani Wilmar, ₹3,600 crore fresh each) as a robustness set: 19 listed names in all. Jio Platforms, which had not listed as of the 26 October 2026 price cutoff, is excluded from all return math.

First, the rankings the cohorts are built on.

Ten largest fresh-issue IPOs (ranked by fresh component):

Ten largest OFS IPOs (ranked by OFS component):

Two companies, Paytm and Tata Capital, appear in both tables. Across the two top-10 lists, fresh issues raised ₹85,358 crore of new company capital while selling shareholders took home ₹1,40,886 crore, roughly 1.65 rupees of exits for every rupee of new capital.

Here is the scoreboard, cut down to the columns that carry the analysis. Alpha (pp) = Allottee TR % − Nifty 50 TRI % over the identical window (listing date → 26 Oct 2026). Allottee TR is dividend-adjusted total return from the issue price. Each stock's full drawdown and time-underwater record follows in the next section.

*Rank-11 fresh ties (₹3,600 crore fresh each), included as a robustness set. "Both" = the IPO carried large fresh and OFS components. Price cutoff: 26 Oct 2026.

The summary lines are worth reading twice. The mean allottee return is −6.6 percent, but the median is −16.3 percent, and the gap is the point: four big winners (Meesho +93.5 percent, Waaree +54.3 percent, LG +42.2 percent, ICICI Prudential AMC +27.2 percent) flatter the average while the typical mega-IPO lost money. Six of 19 trade above their issue price today. Only four delivered a positive return to someone who bought at the listing-day close. Twelve of 19 underperformed the Nifty 50 TRI over their own listing windows.

There is also a quieter finding hiding in the two entry points. The median allottee (−16.3 percent) did worse than the median day-one-close buyer (−9.2 percent), because the median stock popped around 13 percent on debut and then bled. For the two worst names, LIC and Paytm, both entry points destroyed money. But for the broad sample, the investor who received an allotment at the issue price had, on median, the worse outcome of the two.

The drawdowns nobody underwrote

Returns tell you where a stock finished. Drawdowns tell you what holding it felt like, and for this cohort the feeling was brutal even where the ending was decent.

Paytm is the single worst pain trade in the sample: 100 percent of its 1,218 trading days spent below the ₹2,150 issue price, with a peak-to-trough collapse of 82.4 percent over 895 days from November 2021 to May 2024, and it has never once closed above the issue price on an adjusted basis. LIC is the case that looked worse than it is once a corporate action is handled properly: the stock had a 2:1 split effective 29 May 2026, and on the correctly split-adjusted series it spent 84.3 percent of its trading days below the ₹949 issue price (not all of them) and fell at most 44.0 percent below the issue price, within a 39.2 percent peak-to-trough drawdown from May 2022 to March 2023. The end result is unchanged and brutal: the ₹949 allottee is down 59.9 percent while the Nifty 50 TRI gained 47.7 percent, an excess of minus 107.6 points.

Ola Electric managed the fastest route to pain: its drawdown began on day ten of trading and reached 84.4 percent by March 2026, the deepest in the sample, and it spent 83.2 percent of its listed life below ₹76. Swiggy's worst point came on 23 October 2026, five days before the price cutoff, a 70.5 percent fall from its December 2024 peak.

Read across the full 19, five names never closed below their issue price at all: LG Electronics India, ICICI Prudential AMC, Manipal Health, Meesho and Waaree Energies, the same names that top the winners' column. Adani Wilmar owns the longest agony, a 79.5 percent drawdown spanning 1,419 days from April 2022 to March 2026, though as a strong dividend payer it spent only 16.9 percent of its days below the ₹230 issue price. Three financial names were still making fresh drawdown lows at the 26 October cutoff: Tata Capital (minus 21.7 percent), SBI Funds Management (minus 25.9 percent) and HDB Financial (minus 41.8 percent). The median stock spent 57.4 percent of its trading days below its issue price.

The deceptive cases are the ones that look fine now. PB Fintech is back above its ₹980 issue price (+4.4 percent) after a drawdown that took it down 74.3 percent within a year of listing; it still sits roughly 48 percent below its December 2025 peak. Hyundai Motor India needed 241 days to reclaim its issue price and has not made a new high, yet its final line, −4.7 percent against an index that fell 4.8 percent over the same window, looks almost boring. Adani Wilmar fell as much as 79.5 percent from its April 2022 peak over 1,419 days, but because it listed at ₹230 and ran up first, it spent only 17 percent of its trading days below the issue price. Same stock, two very different experiences depending on where you measured from.

Fresh capital versus shareholder exits

The question that comes with every big IPO: does it matter whether the money went to the company or to the seller? Here is what the two cohorts delivered.

On the surface, the fresh-issue cohort was the worse buy: a deeper median loss and a median drawdown twice as large. But this is where the data refuses to cooperate with the simple story. The fresh cohort is dominated by loss-making consumer-tech (Paytm, Swiggy, Meesho), an EV maker and a logistics company. The OFS cohort is dominated by profitable financial institutions: two asset managers, two NBFCs and the NSE, the same financial-services complex that carried ₹48,260 crore of OFS across 2023 to September 2026 listings. Structure and sector travelled together.

Look inside the fresh cohort and the split is clean. Profitable or reasonably priced fresh issuers did well: Waaree +54.3 percent, Meesho +93.5 percent, Manipal Health +5.7 percent. Loss-makers collapsed: Ola −60.6 percent, Swiggy −52.4 percent. The seller's identity did not map cleanly to outcomes either. The two government- and parent-controlled OFS names bracket the distribution, LIC at −59.9 percent and Hyundai at −4.7 percent, and Adani Wilmar, the one ₹3,600 crore all-fresh mega-deal, still returned −24.9 percent. An OFS tells you about the sellers' motives, rarely about the business. What the money bought, and what was paid for it, did the predictive work.

Hype pointed the wrong way

If oversubscription marks a top, this sample never got the memo. Subscription multiples against eventual allottee returns produce a Spearman rank correlation of +0.57, the opposite of the hype hypothesis: the most sought-after issues (Meesho, Waaree, LG, SBI Funds) mostly held up, and the lukewarm ones (Paytm, LIC, Tata Capital) mostly did not. Listing-day premiums told the same weak-positive story at +0.51. Issue size showed no reliable relationship at all (−0.24, statistically indistinguishable from zero on 16 observations).

These are small samples, and none of it is causal. But the direction is consistent: in this dataset, heavy demand was closer to an endorsement than a warning, and listing euphoria contained almost no information about what followed.

What actually separated winners from losers

The common thread in the failures is the price paid for the business, set against the business that existed.

PB Fintech listed at what a broker note at the time called 22.1 times FY21 book value and 46 times market cap to FY21 sales, a level the note itself described as stretched. The stock went on to lose roughly 74 percent peak to trough before recovering to barely above the issue price five years later. Manipal Health listed at a valuation above ₹77,600 crore against trailing profit of ₹654.93 crore, an implied multiple of roughly 118 times earnings, and its +5.7 percent allottee return is roughly what you would expect from a price like that. Swiggy's Red Herring Prospectus showed losses widening from ₹2,350 crore in FY23 to ₹4,179 crore in FY24; the company is still loss-making and made a fresh low in October 2026. Ola Electric had a trailing net margin of −92.6 percent with revenue shrinking 49.2 percent year on year by mid-2026; a −60.6 percent allottee return is the fundamentals catching up with the listing.

The winners paid you back for the risk differently. LG Electronics India and ICICI Prudential AMC sit on real, steady profits, and both were 100 percent OFS issues, the structure supposedly most threatening to public shareholders. Waaree's 208-times QIB subscription chased a profitable solar manufacturer. Meesho is the awkward one for every tidy rule: a loss-making consumer-tech name that has returned +93.5 percent since listing, in the freshest vintage in the sample.

Profitability at the time of the IPO, more than issue structure, more than hype, more than size, is what separated the survivors.

The verdict

So did investors make good returns on India's biggest IPOs? Mostly, measured and without drama: no. Twelve of 19 underperformed the Nifty 50 TRI from their own listing dates. The median allottee is down 16.3 percent in total-return terms, the median stock spent 57.4 percent of its trading days below its issue price, and the median maximum drawdown was 42.5 percent. The average is less bad (−6.6 percent) only because of four outliers.

But the failure mode is specific rather than structural. The losses cluster in loss-making companies priced at extreme multiples, regardless of whether the money went to the company or to selling shareholders. Profitable businesses that listed at defensible prices, including in pure OFS structures, rewarded their allottees. The three-to-six-month window, where this cohort was comfortably ahead of the index, should make anyone suspicious of both the doom and the euphoria at listing: the verdict on a mega-IPO was visible only in year two.

There is one more honest caveat. The strongest performers in the sample, Meesho, ICICI Prudential AMC, LG Electronics, Waaree, all listed in late 2025, and most of the 2025-26 vintage is less than a year old. That is far too little history to call it a turnaround. It is enough to note that the most recent big IPOs have so far behaved better than the cohort that came before them, and that the next two years of their price history will be the real test.

This is historical and descriptive analysis, not investment advice, and not prepared by a SEBI-registered Research Analyst.