The IPO Playbook

First published 24 Aug 2026 · Last verified 29 Aug 2026

Rajendra Koirala teaches mathematics at a secondary school in Butwal, and for eleven years he has run the same small ritual every time a new company floats its shares in Nepal. He sits at the kitchen table on a Friday evening with his wife Sunita, his college-going son Bishal, and a spiral notebook that has outlived three phones and two changes of government. In the notebook are columns: company name, sector, issue price, units applied, bank used, CRN linked, date applied, result. It looks unremarkable, almost bureaucratic. But Rajendra's family has been allotted shares in fourteen of the last twenty-two IPOs they applied for, a hit rate well above the crowded-lottery average, and the reason has nothing to do with luck or connections. It has to do with never once being rejected on a technicality, never missing a deadline, and never applying to an IPO his notebook's scoring system told him to skip. Chapter 69 already asked whether an IPO is worth applying for. This chapter asks a narrower and more mechanical question: once you have decided to apply, how do you execute the application itself so that nothing but the lottery decides your outcome? In Nepal's IPO market, where tens of thousands of applications get auto-rejected every cycle for reasons that have nothing to do with market judgment, the operational playbook is not a footnote. It is half the game.

Lesson 77.1 — The Infrastructure: Demat, BOID, CRN, and the ASBA Bank Link

Before an investor can click "Apply" on a single IPO, four separate pieces of infrastructure must already exist and must already be correctly connected to one another. Most rejected applications in Nepal are not rejected because the investor made a bad decision on results day; they are rejected weeks earlier, when one of these four pieces was set up carelessly and nobody noticed until the money was blocked, or not blocked, at the wrong bank.

The first piece is the demat account itself, opened through a Depository Participant, or DP. A DP is typically a licensed brokerage house or a bank's merchant banking arm that has registered with the Central Depository System and Clearing Limited, universally known as CDSC, the sole securities depository in Nepal. Opening a demat account requires citizenship certificate details, a PAN number, a passport-size photograph, bank account information, and nominee details, all submitted either in person at a DP counter or increasingly through the DP's own online onboarding portal. The output of this step is a sixteen-digit Beneficial Owner ID, the BOID, which becomes the investor's permanent identity inside the entire CDSC ecosystem. Every share the investor ever owns, every IPO application, every dividend, every transfer traces back to this one number.

The second piece is registration on MeroShare, the CDSC's own online portal at meroshare.cdsc.com.np, which is where the actual IPO application happens. MeroShare registration uses the DP ID plus the BOID to create a username and password, and this is also where the investor sets a separate transaction PIN, a shorter numeric code required to authorize the final submission of any application. Many investors confuse the login password with the transaction PIN; they are different credentials serving different purposes, and forgetting the PIN on the last day of an issue window, with no time to reset it, is a recurring and entirely avoidable cause of missed applications.

The third piece, and the one most frequently mishandled, is the CRN itself. A CRN is not generated by MeroShare; it is generated by the ASBA bank, the bank that will actually hold and block the applicant's money. ASBA stands for Application Supported by Blocked Amount, a mechanism carried over from banking-sector IPO practice, under which the investor's application money is not withdrawn at the moment of application but merely frozen, or blocked, inside the investor's own account, and only debited if and when the investor is actually allotted shares. Nepal's version, administered through CDSC, is commonly called C-ASBA, and it is offered by essentially all commercial banks, most development banks, and many finance companies, each of which appears on CDSC's published C-ASBA registered bank list. To obtain a CRN, the investor typically requests it from the bank branch where they hold a normal savings or current account, or increasingly through that bank's own mobile or internet banking application, and the bank issues a CRN number tied to that specific account and to the investor's citizenship or PAN details on file with the bank. That CRN is then entered into the investor's MeroShare profile, under bank details, linking MeroShare to that one bank account. Only one bank account can be linked as the active CRN at any given time; changing banks means requesting a fresh CRN and updating the MeroShare profile before the next application.

The fourth piece is simply making sure the name, citizenship number, and date of birth recorded with the DP, with CDSC, and with the ASBA bank are identical, character for character. A demat account opened under "Rajendra Kumar Koirala" and a bank account opened years earlier under "Rajendra K. Koirala" can trigger a mismatch flag during the reconciliation CDSC and the registrar run before finalising allotment eligibility, and this kind of clerical ghost has killed more applications than any actual investment misjudgment.

For a first-time investor, the sequence to have fully operational before any IPO opens is therefore: open a demat account with a DP, receive the BOID, register on MeroShare with that BOID and DP ID, open or identify a bank account at a C-ASBA-enabled bank, request a CRN from that bank, and finally enter the CRN into the MeroShare profile under "Edit Bank Details." Rajendra keeps a laminated card with his own BOID, his DP ID, his CRN, and his MeroShare username taped inside his notebook's back cover, not because he forgets them but because the one time in 2021 he had to help his elderly mother apply from her own account under a family literacy quota, he realised that half the friction in IPO season comes from people fumbling for numbers they wrote down somewhere and can no longer find.

Lesson 77.2 — The MeroShare Application Walkthrough, Click by Click

With the infrastructure in place, the actual application is short, which is precisely why investors underestimate how much can go wrong in those two or three minutes. The walkthrough below is the exact sequence Rajendra's family follows for every issue, and it is worth internalizing as a checklist rather than a narrative, because on results day speed and accuracy both matter.

The investor logs into meroshare.cdsc.com.np using the registered username, password, and DP selection, and lands on the dashboard. From the left-hand menu, the relevant section is labelled "My ASBA," and within it, "Apply for Issue." This screen lists every IPO, FPO, mutual fund unit issue, or debenture currently open for subscription across the entire market, not just the one the investor intends to apply for, so the first mechanical step is locating the correct company name in the list, because two similarly named companies open in the same week is not a rare occurrence in an active IPO year.

Clicking "Apply" on the correct listing opens the application form itself. The BOID and demat details auto-populate from the login session. The investor selects the applicable investor category if more than one is offered, typically "Ordinary" for a general retail applicant, distinct from categories reserved for mutual funds, foreign employment quota, or company employees, and selecting the wrong category is itself a rejection cause discussed further in Lesson 77.6. The investor then enters the number of units applied for, in multiples of 10, and the system automatically calculates the total applied amount by multiplying units by the offer price disclosed in the prospectus.

The next field is the bank account to be debited, which the system populates from the CRN linked in the investor's profile; if no CRN is linked, or if the linked CRN belongs to an account with an expired mandate, the application cannot proceed past this screen, which is exactly why Lesson 77.1's setup work has to be finished well in advance rather than attempted at the moment of application. The investor confirms the bank branch and account number displayed, checks the boxes declaring the application details are correct and that they hold no other active application for the same issue, and submits. A final transaction PIN prompt appears, and entering it correctly completes the submission. MeroShare then displays an application reference, and, critically, at this point the investor's bank moves to physically block the applied amount in the linked account, a process that can take anywhere from a few minutes to, in periods of heavy subscription traffic, several hours, since banks are processing block requests for potentially tens of thousands of applicants simultaneously.

Two details commonly trip up otherwise careful applicants at this stage. First, the applied amount must already be sitting as available balance in the linked bank account before the application is submitted; MeroShare and the bank's block system check balance at the moment of the block request, not at the moment of typing the application, and if the balance check runs a few hours after submission and finds insufficient funds, the application is rejected even though the investor "meant" to have the money there. The practical fix is to deposit or transfer the required amount into the linked ASBA account at least a full day before applying, never the same morning. Second, the number of units must respect both the stated minimum, ordinarily 10 kitta, and any maximum specified for the applicant's category in that specific prospectus; entering a unit count outside that band, or a number not divisible by 10, causes the form itself to reject the entry before submission is even possible, which is a minor but real source of wasted time during a narrow application window.

Lesson 77.3 — The Prospectus Checklist: What to Actually Read Before Applying

Nepali IPO prospectuses, formally the issue's Offer Document or Prospectus, are dense documents, often running to more than a hundred pages, and almost no retail applicant reads them cover to cover. But there is a compact set of line items inside every prospectus that takes perhaps fifteen minutes to locate and review, and skipping this fifteen minutes is how investors end up applying for issues they would have avoided had they simply looked at the cover page and the financial summary.

The cover page itself carries the issue size in total rupee value, the number of units on offer, the price per unit or, for book-built issues, the price band, and the opening and closing dates of the subscription window. This is the first checkpoint: confirm the issue is open to the general public category the investor is applying under, and confirm the closing date against the family's own application calendar, since overlapping issue windows are common in busy quarters and a missed closing date is an unforced error no scorecard can fix after the fact.

Deeper into the document, the "Objects of the Issue" or "Use of Proceeds" section states what the company intends to do with the money raised: retire existing debt, fund a specific capacity expansion such as an additional hydropower unit or new bank branches, or simply strengthen working capital. A specific, itemized use of proceeds, with rupee figures attached to named projects, is a materially different signal than a vague statement about "general corporate purposes," and this section alone often separates issuers with a genuine growth plan from issuers raising capital because a regulatory capital requirement forces them to.

The promoter and director background section lists the individuals and entities behind the company, their existing shareholding, and the lock-in period during which promoter shares cannot be sold after listing. A promoter group with a clean regulatory history and sector track record, as opposed to one with a history of diluting quickly after the lock-in expires in past listings, is worth noting; the prospectus discloses names and prior directorships, and a few minutes cross-checking those names against known market reputation is time well spent.

The financial statements section, typically covering the preceding three to five fiscal years, contains the figures every scorecard in Lesson 77.4 will need: revenue trend, net profit trend, earnings per share, net worth or book value per share, and the price-to-earnings ratio implied by the offer price against the latest EPS. A related-party transactions note, usually tucked a few pages further in, discloses any material dealings between the company and its own promoters or their other businesses, and a heavy volume of related-party transactions relative to the company's size is a caution flag regardless of how attractive the headline growth numbers look.

The risk factors section, often skipped entirely by retail applicants because it reads as generic boilerplate, does contain issuer-specific risks buried among the standard disclaimers: a hydropower issuer's risk factors will disclose hydrology dependency and PPA, or power purchase agreement, tenor and pricing terms; a finance company's will disclose loan concentration and non-performing loan trends; an insurance issuer's will disclose claims ratio history. The underwriting and issue management section names the merchant banker managing the issue and discloses whether the issue is underwritten, meaning the manager has committed to purchasing any unsubscribed portion, which is a modest signal of the manager's own confidence in demand. Finally, the distribution ratio section specifies exactly how many units are reserved for the general public, for company employees, for mutual funds, and for Nepali citizens working abroad under the foreign employment quota, and confirming which category the investor is actually eligible for and applying under, rather than assuming, avoids a rejection discussed further in Lesson 77.6.

Lesson 77.4 — The IPO Scorecard: A Weighted Rubric for Objective Rating

Chapter 69 discussed, at the strategic level, what makes an IPO attractive. This lesson converts that judgment into an actual number, because a written scorecard, filled in the same way every single time, is what prevents an investor from talking themselves into applying for a weak issue simply because everyone in their tea-shop is talking about it, or from skipping a genuinely strong issue because the sector is temporarily unfashionable. Rajendra's version of this scorecard has lived on the same page of his notebook for years, refined slightly each cycle, and it produces a single number out of 100 that determines only one thing: whether the family applies at the maximum unit count their liquidity allows, applies at a token minimum simply to stay in the lottery, or skips the issue entirely.

The rubric spreads 100 points across six weighted categories, each scored by the investor from 1 to 5 against a short description of what a low, middle, and high score looks like, with the category weight then applied to convert the raw score into points.

To turn this into a composite score, the investor multiplies each category's 1-to-5 score by its weight and by 20, then sums the six results, producing a figure out of 100. Rajendra's own threshold, developed through trial and error rather than any textbook, is that a composite score above 70 earns a full-size application at the maximum the family's combined liquidity comfortably allows, a score between 50 and 70 earns a minimum-size application purely to preserve lottery odds without over-committing cash, and a score below 50 means the family skips the issue outright regardless of how much buzz surrounds it.

Applied to two contrasting examples from Rajendra's own notebook: a hydropower issuer with a signed long-tenor PPA, three years of steady if unspectacular profit, and an offer P/E modestly below its already-listed peers scored a 74, and the family applied at their comfortable maximum. A finance company issuer the following year, raising capital explicitly to meet a regulatory minimum capital requirement rather than to fund growth, with a vague use-of-proceeds paragraph and a P/E priced above several already-listed peers in the same tier, scored a 46, and the family applied only the minimum 10 units, purely to keep the lottery option alive at negligible cost. Both outcomes, whether allotted or not, were consistent with the scorecard's own logic rather than with hindsight regret, which is the entire point of scoring before the fact rather than narrating a story about it afterward.

Lesson 77.5 — Post-Allotment Actions: The Day You Win and the Day You Don't

CDSC and the issue's registrar publish allotment results on a fixed schedule after an issue closes, ordinarily within a few weeks, and the result is checkable directly inside MeroShare under the "Application Reports" or "ASBA" history section, as well as through CDSC's own public result-lookup tools and the registrar's own website. The moment results are published, there are two entirely different action checklists depending on outcome, and conflating them, or simply doing nothing, wastes either time or money.

If the application was not allotted, the blocked amount in the linked ASBA bank account is released automatically, typically within a few working days of the result announcement, and the investor's only real task is to confirm the release actually happened by checking the bank account balance or block status, rather than assuming it. In practice, unblocks occasionally lag by a day or two longer than expected, especially during heavily oversubscribed issues where a bank is processing thousands of releases simultaneously, and if the money is not unblocked within roughly a week of the announced result, the appropriate next step is a direct query to the bank branch holding the CRN-linked account rather than to the company or CDSC, since the bank, not the registrar, controls the actual release of blocked funds.

If the application was allotted, the applied amount for the allotted units is debited from the linked bank account, and, for any partial allotment, the unallotted portion is released back to the investor exactly as in a full non-allotment. The shares themselves are credited directly into the investor's demat account, visible under the "My Portfolio" or holdings section of MeroShare, without any further action required from the investor to receive them. The task on the day of a successful allotment is not passive, however. It has three parts. First, confirm the exact number of allotted units and the debited amount against what the notebook or record shows was applied for, since partial allotments are common in oversubscribed issues and errors, while rare, are worth a moment's verification against the investor's own record. Second, decide and record, in the moment, the investor's own listing-day intention, whether to sell into the initial listing-day liquidity, hold as a long-term position consistent with the sector thesis from Lesson 77.4's scorecard, or average further if the company remains attractive post-listing; deciding this before the emotional pull of an actual listing-day price movement is far steadier than deciding it while watching a live ticker. Third, update the family's own record with the actual result, feeding back into the scorecard's own track record so that, over several cycles, the investor can see which categories of the rubric actually predicted good outcomes for their own applications and which did not.

Lesson 77.6 — Record-Keeping Across Family Accounts and the Mistakes That Cause Rejection

Many Nepali households, like Rajendra's, apply for the same IPO across several family members' individual demat accounts, each investor applying entirely within their own name, their own BOID, and their own bank account, which is both legal and common, since it is simply several individuals each exercising their own right to apply, not a single person applying multiple times. Managing this across three or four family accounts, however, multiplies the number of moving pieces that can go wrong, and it is exactly the discipline of a shared record-keeping template that keeps a family from repeating the same mechanical mistake across every member's account simultaneously.

Rajendra's notebook format, adapted here as a table, is deliberately simple enough to maintain by hand or in a basic spreadsheet, and covers every field needed to reconstruct, months later, exactly what happened with any single application.

A record like this, maintained consistently across cycles, does two things beyond simple bookkeeping. It lets the family instantly verify, at results time, whether every expected release or debit actually occurred, catching the rare bank-side delay described in Lesson 77.5 before it is forgotten. And over several years it becomes its own dataset for refining the scorecard in Lesson 77.4, since the family can look back and see which sectors, which score ranges, and which promoter groups actually produced allotments and subsequent gains worth having, rather than relying on memory or impression.

The mechanical mistakes that cause outright rejection, distinct from simply not being allotted, cluster around a small and repeating set of causes, and naming them plainly is the fastest way to avoid all of them.

Insufficient balance at the moment the bank actually processes the block, rather than at the moment of application, is the second most common cause, discussed already in Lesson 77.2, and the fix remains the same: fund the linked account at least a full day ahead, never the same morning as the application. Wrong bank or wrong CRN selection is the third recurring cause, typically arising when an investor has changed their primary bank account since last applying but never updated the CRN linked in their MeroShare profile, so the application silently attempts to block funds against a closed or dormant account. Deadline misses, whether from waiting until the last day and hitting server congestion, or from simply losing track of an issue's closing date amid several overlapping issue windows, form the fourth cluster, and the family calendar discipline of applying within the first three days of any window, described in Lesson 77.2, exists specifically to eliminate this cause. Category misselection, applying under the ordinary general public category when eligible instead for, say, the foreign employment quota, or vice versa, produces a rejection or a reallocation the applicant did not intend, and confirming the prospectus's distribution ratio section before selecting a category, as covered in Lesson 77.3, is the preventive step. Finally, duplicate applications, an investor applying twice from the same BOID either by accident, having forgotten a first submission went through, or by attempting to increase odds by resubmitting, are caught and auto-rejected by CDSC's own system, and the only real safeguard is checking the application history inside MeroShare before submitting again for any issue the investor is even slightly unsure about.

Taken together, these six lessons describe a closed loop: infrastructure set up correctly once, an application executed the same careful way every time, a prospectus read for the handful of items that actually matter, a rubric that scores the decision before emotion enters, a clear script for the day results are published, and a record that keeps a family's entire IPO history auditable and improvable year over year. None of this replaces judgment about which companies are worth owning. It simply ensures that judgment, once made, is never undone by a forgotten CRN, a same-day deadline, or a stale KYC record.