Can I buy IPO stock during the pre-market trading on the day of IPO?
The first moment of trading usually occurs even later than that. It may take a few hours to balance the current buy/sell orders and open the stock. Watch CNBC when a hot IPO is about to open and you'll see the process in real time. If you miss it, look at a one day Yahoo chart to see when the open occurred.
Twitter is planning to go public on NYSE. You'll be able to start trading once the stock is listed for trading, which would be the day of the IPO.  Note that since you're trading on the secondary market, you won't be able to buy at the IPO prices, whatever the time is. You're buying from someone who bought at IPO price. Any retail equity brokerage will give you access to the NYSE, and thus Facebook shares as they become available.  However, it is important to note that you nor any retail investor will be able to purchase FB at the IPO prices ($33-38 IIRC).  The only people who will be able to buy in at that price are the underwriting investment banks and major investors who have subscribed to the IPO.  You, and all the other retail investors will only be able to buy in as those major investors offer shares on the secondary market.   This being Facebook, there will probably be a significant premium over the IPO price, both due to demand and systemic underpricing of IPOs to encourage the opening 'pop'.   So, if you're intent on buying in at the IPO, pay close attention as the date approaches.  Look at how the recent big IPOs have performed (GRPN, LNKD come to mind).  Know how much you're willing to commit and what price you want.  However, no one is going to know what the opening market price will be come Friday morning.  Be watching your financial data source / analysis of choice and be prepared to make a judgement. "The hardest part seems to be knowing exactly when to sell the stock.  Well yes, that's the problem with all stock investing. Reports come out all the time, sometimes even from very smart people with no motivation to lie, about expected earnings for this company, or for that industry. Whether those predictions come true is something you will only find out with time. What you are considering is using financial information available to you (and equally available to the public) to make investment choices. This is called 'fundamental analysis'; that is, the analysis of the fundamentals of a business and what it should be worth. It forms the basis of how many investment firms decide where to put their money.  In a perfectly 'efficient' market, all information available to the public is immediately factored into the market price for that company's stock. ie: if a bank report states with absolute certainty (through leaked documents) that Coca-Cola is going to announce 10% revenue growth tomorrow, then everyone will immediately buy Coca-Cola stock today, and then tomorrow there would be no impact. Even if PwC is 100% accurate in its predictions, if the rest of the market agrees with them, then the price at the time of IPO would equal the future value of the cashflows, meaning there would be no gain unless results surpassed expectations. So what you are proposing is to take one sliver of the information available to the public (have you also read all publicly available reports on those businesses and their industries?), and using that to make a high risk investment. Are you going to do better than the investment firms that have teams of researchers and years of experience in the investment world? You can do quite well by picking individual stocks, but you can also lose a lot of money if you do it haphazardly. Be aware that there is risk in doing any type of investing. There is higher than average risk if you invest in equities ('the stock market'). There is higher risk still, if you pick individual stocks. There is yet even higher risk, if you pick small startup companies.  There are some specific interesting side-elements with your proposal to purchase stock about to have an IPO - those are better dealt with in a separate question if you want more information; search this site for 'IPO' and you should find a good starting point. In short, the company about to go public will hire a firm of analysts who will try to calculate the best price the public will accept for an offering of shares. Stock often goes up after IPO, but not always. Sometimes the company doesn't even fill its full IPO order, adding a new type of risk to a potential investor, that the stock will drop on day 1. Consider an analogy outside the investing world:  Let's say Auto Trader magazine prints an article that says ""all 2015 Honda Civics are worth $15,000 if they have less than 50,000 Miles."" Assume you have no particular knowledge about cars. If you read this article, and you see an ad in the paper the next day for a Honda Civic with 40k miles, should you buy it for $14k? The answer is not without more research. And even if you determine enough about cars to find one for $14k that you can reasonably sell for $15k, there's a whole world of mechanics out there who buy and sell cars for a living, and they have an edge both because they can repair the cars themselves to sell for more, and also because they have experience to spot low-offers faster than you. And if you pick a clunker (or a stock that doesn't perform even when everyone expected it would), then you could lose some serious money. As with buying and selling individual stocks, there is money to be made from car trading, but that money gets made by people who really know what they're doing. People who go in without full information are the ones who lose money in the long run." That's because they literally could not help you. It's not that they were just unwilling to. A hedge fund manager might be able to do it, because the person who bet on Facebook would be willing to let him borrow their shares.  An IPO in explain like I'm five:  A bank helps underwrite the shares pre offering. This means they buy the shares wholesale. They buy a large majority of the company in order to offer them to the public when the stock goes public. The bank does this for profit, the company does this become it helps raise their price. The bank that underwrites the stock is legally prohibited from short selling that stock for ***at least***  30 days before the IPO. This is to prevent the bank from trying to commit fraud by selling stock out the front door and betting against it out the back.   ***  So, now let's jump forward to the day of the IPO. The bank is offering stock to everyone who wants to buy it (other banks who will cut it up and sell it to more people). In order to short the stock someone must be willing to let you borrow their shares. Only the bank that underwrote it prohibited from short selling. It's possible but hard. The underwriter has the majority of the shares for the first thirty days anyways. They're just going to release enough of them to raise volume on the ticker symbol (volume is the amount of people buying and selling). The others the underwriter sold to are unwilling to let someone borrow their stock because they want to ride the price hike and shares are in short supply. So while it's possible to short shares, it's very hard. The underwriters limit the supply of shares to prevent that from happening. The underwriters can't just let you short their own shares because they are legally prohibited from it.   Basically, you're left with the fact that the only person who has enough supply to let you short, is prohibited by law from letting you do it. I'm sure Morgan Stanley would have been happy to let their customers short Facebook (as long as you did it through them) to hedge their bets. But they can't. "In an IPO (initial public offering) or APO (additional public offering) situation, a small group of stakeholders (as few as one) basically decide to offer an additional number of ""shares"" of equity in the company. Usually, these ""shares"" are all equal; if you own one share you own a percentage of the company equal to that of anyone else who owns one share. The sum total of all shares, theoretically, equals the entire value of the company, and so with N shares in existence, one share is equivalent to 1/Nth the company, and entitles you to 1/Nth of the profits of the company, and more importantly to some, gives you a vote in company matters which carries a weight of 1/Nth of the entire shareholder body. Now, not all of these shares are public. Most companies have the majority (51%+) of shares owned by a small number of ""controlling interests"". These entities, usually founding owners or their families, may be prohibited by agreement from selling their shares on the open market (other controlling interests have right of first refusal). For ""private"" companies, ALL the shares are divided this way. For ""public"" companies, the remainder is available on the open market, and those shares can be bought and sold without involvement by the company. Buyers can't buy more shares than are available on the entire market. Now, when a company wants to make more money, a high share price at the time of the issue is always good, for two reasons. First, the company only makes money on the initial sale of a share of stock; once it's in a third party's hands, any profit from further sale of the stock goes to the seller, not the company. So, it does little good to the company for its share price to soar a month after its issue; the company's already made its money from selling the stock. If the company knew that its shares would be in higher demand in a month, it should have waited, because it could have raised the same amount of money by selling fewer shares. Second, the price of a stock is based on its demand in the market, and a key component of that is scarcity; the fewer shares of a company that are available, the more they'll cost. When a company issues more stock, there's more shares available, so people can get all they want and the demand drops, taking the share price with it. When there's more shares, each share (being a smaller percentage of the company) earns less in dividends as well, which figures into several key metrics for determining whether to buy or sell stock, like earnings per share and price/earnings ratio. Now, you also asked about ""dilution"". That's pretty straightforward. By adding more shares of stock to the overall pool, you increase that denominator; each share becomes a smaller percentage of the company. The ""privately-held"" stocks are reduced in the same way. The problem with simply adding stocks to the open market, getting their initial purchase price, is that a larger overall percentage of the company is now on the open market, meaning the ""controlling interests"" have less control of their company. If at any time the majority of shares are not owned by the controlling interests, then even if they all agree to vote a certain way (for instance, whether or not to merge assets with another company) another entity could buy all the public shares (or convince all existing public shareholders of their point of view) and overrule them. There are various ways to avoid this. The most common is to issue multiple types of stock. Typically, ""common"" stock carries equal voting rights and equal shares of profits. ""Preferred stock"" typically trades a higher share of earnings for no voting rights. A company may therefore keep all the ""common"" stock in private hands and offer only preferred stock on the market. There are other ways to ""class"" stocks, most of which have a similar tradeoff between earnings percentage and voting percentage (typically by balancing these two you normalize the price of stocks; if one stock had better dividends and more voting weight than another, the other stock would be near-worthless), but companies may create and issue ""superstock"" to controlling interests to guarantee both profits and control. You'll never see a ""superstock"" on the open market; where they exist, they are very closely held. But, if a company issues ""superstock"", the market will see that and the price of their publicly-available ""common stock"" will depreciate sharply. Another common way to increase market cap without diluting shares is simply to create more shares than you issue publicly; the remainder goes to the current controlling interests. When Facebook solicited outside investment (before it went public), that's basically what happened; the original founders were issued additional shares to maintain controlling interests (though not as significant), balancing the issue of new shares to the investors. The ""ideal"" form of this is a ""stock split""; the company simply multiplies the number of shares it has outstanding by X, and issues X-1 additional shares to each current holder of one share. This effectively divides the price of one share by X, lowering the barrier to purchase a share and thus hopefully driving up demand for the shares overall by making it easier for the average Joe Investor to get their foot in the door. However, issuing shares to controlling interests increases the total number of shares available, decreasing the market value of public shares that much more and reducing the amount of money the company can make from the stock offering." The moment the dividend is announced, especially from a company that doesn't normally pay dividends, the dividend is factored into everybody's analysis. In the absence of any other news the price of apple would be expected to drop once the dividend in locked in. Why would I buy shares from you at full price one day after the dividend is paid, if I will have to wait for the next dividend? Also keep in mind the dividend was announced on July 24th, and is given to shareholders of record on August 13th. You are way behind the curve. Does me holding stock in the company make me an accredited investor with this company in particular? No.  But maybe the site will let you trade it your shares to another accredited investor. Just ask, if the site operators have a securities lawyer they should be able to accomodate "Yes when I place an order with my broker they send it out to the exchange. - For individual investors, what are some cons and pros of trading on    the exchanges directly versus indirectly via brokers? I may be mistaken(I highly doubt it), but from my understanding you cannot trade directly through an exchange as a retail investor. BATS allows membership but it is only for  Your firm must be a registered broker-dealer, registered with a Self Regulatory Organization (SRO) and connected with a clearing firm. No apple (aapl) is listed on the NASDAQ so trades go through the NASDAQ for aapl. Caterpillar Inc (CAT) is listed on the NYSE so trades go through the NYSE.  The exchange you trade on is dependent on the security, if it is listed on the NYSE then you trade on the NYSE. As a regular investor you will be going through a broker. When looking to purchase a security it is more important to know about the company and less important to know what exchange it is listed on. Since there are rules a company must comply with for it to be listed on certain exchanges, it does make a difference but that is more the case when speaking about a stock listed Over the Counter(OTC) or NYSE. It is not important when asking NYSE or NASDAQ? Selecting a broker is something that's dependent on your needs. You should ask your self, ""whats important to me?"", ""Do I want apps(IE: iPhone, android)?"" ""Do I need fancy trading tools?"". Generally all the brokers you listed will most likely do the trick for you. Some review sites: Brokerage Review  Online Broker Review 2012 Barron's 2012 Online Broker Review"