Stock Slide Slows Silicon Valley IPOs
SAN JOSE (KCBS) – The sudden slide in the stock market over the last few trading sessions may put a dampener on the recent resurgence of high tech initial public offerings. Now, Bay Area start-ups may wait until stocks recover before going public.
This spring investors began snapping up shares of LinkedIn and Pandora as they made their initial public offerings, but that was before Monday's tech sell-off where local high tech companies really took a beating.
Greg Ingram, head of Equity Capital Markets at Robert W. Baird said that a bear market is not usually the best time to go public.
KCBS' Matt Bigler Reports:
"Today we're up, so maybe someone would say, 'good, you can go public today,'" laughed Baird. "But unfortunately it doesn't work that way."
Baird said that investors are generally looking for stability during periods of market vulnerability.
Larry Dignan, editor at ZDNet said that it's too early to tell if the window for high tech IPOs is officially closed.
"If this is a longer term endeavor and stocks are headed down for awhile, I'd probably say the IPO window's shut for awhile," said Dignan.
Some market watchers tell USA Today that better established companies like Facebook will still likely go public soon.
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