IPO Outlook: After a Dull Spell, IPO Action Begins To Heat Up Again
It's not quite IPO Mania again, but . . . .</br></br>With 18 initial public offerings of stock on this week's calendar, coming after several IPOs rallied smartly last week, it is clear that new issues are being sought after by investors again. This is good news for Wall Street investment bankers now sitting on a $45 billion backlog of pending new stock, the vast majority of them IPOs (rather than follow-on deals by already-public companies).</br></br>Shaking off the IPO slowdown caused by April's technology-stock plunge, investors are once again eager to snap up shares in fledgling companies. Most Wall Street firms have spent the past few days brushing the dust off IPOs that have been on the shelf.</br></br>"We're going to see a fairly healthy slug of new product hit the market over the next four to six weeks," predicts Tom Fox, head of equity capital markets at Donaldson, Lufkin & Jenrette Inc. "The window seems to be reopening."</br></br>Yet despite the big crop of new issues on tap for this week-markets permittingthe IPO market isn't as frothy as it once was. For starters, investors, bruised from the spring's stock declines, remain wary of baby-faced companies looking for cash infusions at high valuations.