ABSTRACT

Initial public offerings (IPOs) were the most prevalent form of securities issuance to raise capital firms wanting to go public during the last decade (1990-2000) in the United States. The IPO phenomenon got a tremendous boost during the late 1990s by the popularity of the Internet stocks. Unfortunately, with the stock market downturn that taken place after the spring of 2000, many of these stocks had succumbed to the market pressure and had gone out of the market. Many well-established companies in the United States had also taken resort to the IPO market that are still in business and some are, in fact, thriving. Although technology-heavy NASDAQ stock market had the largest number of IPO firms, the New York Stock Exchange(NYSE) also had its share of the IPOs which were not insignificant at all in number.