By the 1990s, the term flipper was commonly used to describe people who bought shares in initial public offerings (IPOs) and resold them quickly. People often described the flippers in admiring terms, as people who understood that IPOs were typically underpriced on the offering date. When the share price popped up soon after the IPO, the flippers made a quick profit. A famous 1991 article by Jay Ritter showed that the initial IPO price pop tended to be followed by weak performance over subsequent years, so the optimal strategy appeared to be buying IPOs at the offering and then flipping them.
