The majority of the empirical literature on initial public offerings (IPOs) concentrates on the impact of newly listed companies' characteristics on the initial return. It is implicitly assumed that investors act only in accordance with the information they have collected before the application deadline and that the market reaction towards the public listing of a new offering will only be known on the first day of trading. Using data from a large sample of IPOs in Hong Kong, the study shows that an offering's rate of subscription contains important information of its own. Namely, it is demonstrated that the well-known relationship between initial returns and the ex-post volatility of returns actually is spurious, volatility being associated with the unpredicted component of the subscription rate.