Business Insight Zone

Now is the IPO season of our discontent
Made glorious summer by . . .

. . . well, nothing, actually. So far, at least, there is no sunny news on the IPO front. Maybe — maybe — underwriters will respond to the U.S. government bailout now underway. Then again, the markets are down by about 4% today as I write this, so maybe not.

Anyway, in advance of the Q3 IPO Scorecard that we’ll be releasing in a couple of weeks, I went combing through our IPO Central information and came up with a few tidbits that suggest just how badly the U.S. IPO market is faring right now.

• As of this morning, no companies had made an IPO on a major U.S. exchange in September. The last time the U.S. exchanges had a blank IPO month was in early 2003.
• No month this year has seen a double-digit number of IPOs — and in fact the busiest month so far was May, which saw only 7.
• In the 48 months from 2004 to 2007, there were 42 months that had more than 7 IPOs.
• There have been 30 IPOs so far this year, compared to 163 or more in each of the past four years.

As I’ve said many times before, unless you have a brand name on par with Google’s or VISA’s, you don’t make your market debut without the expectation that you’ll at least get a favorable hearing from investors. These days, though, investors aren’t feeling consistently favorable about anything.

Whether they’ll change their minds between now and the end of the quarter is anybody’s guess — but from where I sit, it doesn’t look likely.

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Related:

• The IPO market, such as it is.
• IPO prospects for 2008.
• Visa’s IPO: Into every howling stormfront of financial doom
  a ray of the purest sunshine must fall.
• The IPO market: a short historical recap.
  

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