IPOs: Back from the Dead?

by Ben Steverman, BusinessWeek.com, May 8, 2008:
A nervous Wall Street scorned initial public offerings for months, but suddenly IPOs are popular again.
Recent stock market debuts have been successful, including the largest IPO ever—Visa's (V) $19.6 billion deal—and a herd of new offerings are hitting the market soon. The next couple weeks are expected to be the busiest time for IPOs so far this year.
Investors seem more and more willing to take chances on small, fast-growing startups. That sort of appetite for risk has been hard to find since last fall, as a bear market and a credit crisis took big bites out of many portfolios.
After a tough start to 2008, the broader stock market recovered a bit. The broad Standard & Poor's 500-stock index gained 3.5% in the month before May 6. But the IPO market is doing even better. Recent IPOs, measured by Renaissance Capital's IPO index, are up 12.2% in the past month.
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