'Stock Offerings Take Wing'

t's a warm, sunny pre-holiday Friday here, so I thought I'd offer a couple of bits of bright news:

Stock offerings take wing on NYSE Euronext (Business Week) Excerpt:

The dollar sizes are modest and there aren’t many of them, but initial public offerings and secondary stock offerings are showing a surprising bit of life. “I call it a streak in the first inning,” says Scott R. Cutler, an executive vice president at NYSE Euronext who runs the exchange company’s listing for the Americas.

Indeed, there have been some solid hits in the last few months culminating in the offering on May 20 for SolarWinds, an Austin (Texas)-based software provider. The outfit raised $151.5 million as it became the fifth domestic IPO to debut on the NYSE so far this year. Together, the five raised $1.4 billion.

Excited as traders are about this clutch of deals, they amount to a trickle compared with the recent offering high-water mark, set in 2007. Back then, over 230 U.S. offerings generated about $53 billion.

Nonetheless, the new deals seem like a torrent compared with a roughly eight-month stretch last year when virtually nothing was happening in the initial offering market.

Two Technology Offerings Find Favor on Wall Street (New York Times) Excerpt (and BTW, great photo from the NYSE trading floor!):

The dry spell in initial public offerings for venture-backed technology companies may be over. This week, two of those companies went public: OpenTable, the online restaurant reservation service, and SolarWinds, which makes network management software.

Investors gave both of them warm receptions. Shares of OpenTable, which began trading Thursday on Nasdaq, were originally priced at $20 and jumped 60 percent to close at $31.89. Shares of SolarWinds, which began trading Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange, closed Thursday at $13.79, 10 percent above their offering price of $12.50.