IPO's Bounce Back

2004 has proven to be a great year for IPO's. Google immediately comes to mind, having doubled its shares only a couple months after it's introduction. As impressive as this increase is, Google was only ranked 19th among 2004 top IPO's. In 2004 there were 192 offerings raising about $39 billion. While this is great compared to the 221 that have been introduced in the past 3 years combined, it is far from being close to the 400 that were introduced in 1999. Particularly in the tech industry were the performances impressive. Tech IPO's averaged about 31% up from their introductory price. Eight of the top ten performing IPO's were tech stocks. Overall this is indicates that things are picking up. Kathy Smith from Renaissance Capitol stipulated that there could be as many as 250 IPO's next year, raising in total roughly $50 billion. She also said that another positive sign about this years increase in IPO's was that the stocks were well established, in contrast to the 1990 boom where the offerings were more speculative. Thus it appears that things are beginning to firm up in this area and will lead to a strong year in 2005.