Business Insight Zone

We have now exited the Grand Canyon of IPOs thanks to the market debut of Grand Canyon Education, the parent of online college Grand Canyon University. As our IPO Central pages indicate, this marks the first IPO on major U.S. markets in more than 100 days — since poor Rackspace came to the market with a solid financial track record and got spanked for its troubles.

Think about what’s happened in the financial world in the past 100 days, and it’s not surprising that companies looking to debut (not to mention their underwriters) would have stayed away from the market in droves. Given the way that Grand Canyon’s offer price was lowered and lowered again before it ever debuted, and given the indifferent-at-best response of the markets, this offering doesn’t augur well to provoke many more IPOs during the rest of 2008.

Oh, and since Grand Canyon’s offering was for a mere $126 million — paltry by IPO standards — it also won’t be moving the needle much for the dollar value of deals in 2008, which has seen both the number and size of IPOs decline radically from the previous four years.

The motto for this IPO market might be the same as that for cellar-dwelling teams in sports: “Wait ’til next year.”

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Related posts:

• Hoover’s IPO Scorecard for Q3, or, Market Carnage.
• The global IPO market, such as it is.
• Weakness prevails in the IPO market.
• Rackspace’s IPO — what it tells us about the IPO market.

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Photo by Barbara L. Slavin.

Category: IPOs