Following in TURF's footsteps, ALOY should be successful:
Indications of Interest
By Ben Holmes
Special to TheStreet.com
5/10/99 3:59 PM ET
I love to experiment, and always have. So, when our ever-inventive technologist came up with a new way of measuring just what people did when they came to the ipoPros Web site, I started wondering what ipoPros readers might teach us about the IPO market.
One thing that occurred to me was that I could measure the number of times that a given deal was looked at on a given day or for, say, a week. Which got me wondering if there was any relationship between the number of hits a deal got on the ipoPros system and the actual performance of the IPO or secondary offering.
So, after a week of carefully collecting the data, I began the process of sifting through log files. Almost immediately, it was clear that a very small number of deals garnered a disproportionate percentage of users' eyeballs. By running a simple query, I was able to determine the total number of hits received by each of the 349 deals in the ipoPros system from 12:01 a.m. Monday to midnight Sunday -- a full week of traffic.
To make this as meaningful as possible, I narrowed down the request to just those deals scheduled to price this week. Here, listed in order of popularity (i.e., hits received) are the five most popular deals scheduled to price this week:
1.Time Warner Telecom: 1,245 hits
2.Alloy Online: 1,061 hits
3.Copper Mountain Networks: 870 hits
4.Tenfold: 587 hits
5.Scient: 618 hits
Now, what conclusion can we draw from this exercise? Are the users of the ipoPros site more adept at picking deals than I am? Will some sophisticated Web counter replace me? That's the exciting part: We won't know until our little experiment has run its course. So, check back next week for the initial results.
In the meantime, here are the deals for this week:
Alloy Online IPO:(ALOY:Nasdaq) Provides community, content and commerce to Generation Y. Deal size: 3.7 million shares. Price range: 10 - 12. Led by: BancBoston Robertson Stephens. My take: The market loves these demographically focused community sites -- compare with iTurf (TURF:Nasdaq). |
