Retail investors rush to buy Alibaba IPO

REUTERS - Retail investors were rushing to place orders for shares in the initial public offering Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, which is likely to be the largest in history.

TD Ameritrade Holding Corp saw the number of investor orders for shares in the Chinese e-commerce company hit 75 percent of the orders that came in during premarket trading at the Facebook Inc IPO, JJ Kinahan, chief market strategist at TD Ameritrade, told Reuters on Friday morning. At the same time, the expected price of those shares kept climbing.

The number of investor orders represented almost three times what the firm saw in premarket trading before the Twitter Inc IPO, Kinahan said in an interview.

Meanwhile, financial advisers were flooded with calls from clients in the past 48 hours interested in buying shares of the company.

"I think as the chatter has increased and the date of the IPO got closer, investors are deciding to get in," said Alan Haft, a Newport California-based financial adviser, who has seen the number of clients who want to buy shares almost double in the past few days. "The common thread I hear is 'this is the Amazon of China.'"

As of Monday, 88 percent of American consumers had not even heard of Alibaba, according to an Ipsos poll conducted for Thomson Reuters.

"The level of interest has taken us by surprise, to be honest ... we thought (the level of interest) would be along the lines of Twitter," Kinahan said.

Retail investors generally get only 10 percent to 20 percent of shares in big IPOs.

Joe Vietri, the head of Charles Schwab Corp's options trading business, said almost his entire team was occupied in preparing for an onslaught of Alibaba trades.

The offer, which was distributed at $68 per share in the IPO, began trading at $92.70 at 11:53 a.m. EDT (1553 GMT) on the New York Stock Exchange.

Further company coverage: [BABA.N]

(Reporting by Jessica Toonkel; Additional reporting by Jed Horowitz; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama, Linda Stern and Jeffrey Benkoe)