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Strategies & Market Trends : Are you considering quitting your dayjob to daytrade?! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Hubert Few who wrote (144)	1/17/1999 10:00:00 PM
From: puborectalis	Respond to of 611

More big Internet IPOs in the making By Peter D. Henig Red Herring Online January 6, 1999 If Internet IPOs want to get in while the getting is good, they'd better hurry. Not only are all of the major indexes breaking records as we speak, but Internet stocks are going absolutely ballistic, continuing their 1998 run into the stratosphere as online and institutional investors continue to pour money straight into the Web. "It's insanity.com," echoes John Fitzgibbon, editor of The IPO Reporter. "But the outlook for the IPO market looks fantastic, things are bubbling, and CBS MarketWatch.com coming out next week should be a moonshot." Mr. Fitzgibbon, like many other analysts on the Street, expects that the IPO pipeline will soon attract a new round of Internet and Internet-related players seeking to go public in 1999; the market is simply too hot to pass up this golden, if potentially unsustainable, opportunity. HOW MUCH IS TOO MUCH? But when do enough Internet IPOs suddenly become a glut of Internet IPOs? Not anytime soon, say analysts. "There's no yardstick for when how much is too much," answers Mr. Fitzgibbon, who says, with an "unequivocal yes," that more Internet IPOs are on the way. "The people I know care about names, not numbers," says Mr. Fitzgibbon, "and they think these stocks are going to be hot in the aftermarket." If last year's track record by some of Wall Street's lead underwriters is any indication, that's probably a safe bet. Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch raised a record $7.9 billion and $7.1 billion, respectively, for IPO clients in 1998. Meanwhile, Goldman Sachs raised $3.4 billion in the IPO market. But more importantly, Internet IPOs became a staple of these firms' underwriting practices. For instance, the offering from online auctioneer eBay (EBAY), floated by Goldman Sachs, proved to be the best performing issue of 1998, racking up gains of more than 1,600 percent from its offering price of $18. And even though Goldman Sachs raised only about half as much money from IPOs in 1998 as it did in 1997, it still played a hot hand in some of the other blockbuster Internet deals of the year, including DoubleClick (DCLK) and Inktomi (INKT). MORE ON THE WAY Now that 1999 has finally made its debut, so too will several Internet IPOs, as the deals in registration get accelerated to market. "There are quite a few Internet offerings lined up, like iVillage and the Mining Company.com," says Brad Sinrod, president of IPO.com, "and we're beginning to hear rumors of a few more Internet companies about to file." Among those, sources close to the Red Herring indicate that Marimba, TheStreet.com, and Multex will all seek public market debuts early this year. These deals will be in addition to Pacific Internet, Nvidia, Modem Media.Poppe Tyson, VerticalNet, and Digital Lava, which are each expected to emerge out of registration soon.