The IPO date:  
The date the new stock is publicly made available for the first time to all investors on a stock exchange.

The IPO initial number of shares offered:  
This number will allow you to begin your competitive comparisons. For example, say Coke (symbol "KO") was already public with 2 million shares of stock outstanding, and Pepsi (now symbol "PEP") announced that it would be selling shares of stock in an IPO, and that it would be offering an initial amount of 1 million shares of stock. If Coke is selling at $10 a share, what would you think the initial IPO price would be in the new IPO of Pepsi?... It's not just a matter of simple math but, if Coke and Pepsi had EXACTLY the same assets, sales and profits (and the same future prospects), then you might conclude that, using simple division, Pepsi's stock would be priced at TWICE the amount of Coke, since they would only have HALF the amount of shares outstanding (that is, each share of Pepsi SHOULD be valued at $20 per share, since we are assuming that each company is exactly the same value.

But that's not very realistic, is it?... All companies have different levels of success - different amounts of sales and profits - and are valued differently.

Which leads us into the third, and final, most important detail about a company's IPO...

The IPO pricing:  
The investment bankers set an expected price "range" for a new stock offering. They might announce, "the new IPO in Pepsi is expected to be offered in the range between $18 and $22 a share. They typically set the IPO price at the last possible moment the day of the IPO itself. (This allows them to look at the state of the market that minute. They want the IPO to be "fully subscribed" which means that the IPO will sell out that day, so they want to price it accordingly, but as high as possible so that they maximize their compensation from the deal - i.e., which is based on that fixed IPO price).

Okay, back to stock and what it is...

So, you get that stock shares are like owning a little piece of the company. If there were just 100 shares of stock outstanding in a company, and you owned 10 shares of stock, then you would be a 10% owner of that company.

Of course you know that companies typically have millions or billions of shares outstanding. For example, the technology company, Intel (symbol INTC) has about 5.6 billion shares of stock outstanding.