That said, let’s take a closer look at the numbers. The busiest IPO month of late was October 2012. That calendar turned out 23 deals, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filings. And before that, the busiest month was November 2007. That calendar turned out 38 IPOs.

 

Fast forward to the present: By May 17, 2013, the IPO calendar for the Merry Month of May had already turned out 21 IPOs – and there are two more weeks to go.

 

Now let’s look at this week.

 

This week’s calendar has six IPOs. They expect to raise over $1 billion. To add a little spice, two deals are on the “most wanted” list, according to the IPO professionals.

 

ChannelAdvisor (ECOM – proposed) and Ply Gem Holdings (PGEM – proposed) are reportedly on everybody’s list.

 

ChannelAdvisor plans to price 5.75 million shares at $12 to $14 each on Wednesday evening. The IPO is expected to start trading on Thursday morning on the New York Stock Exchange under the proposed symbol “ECOM.” The joint-lead managers are Goldman Sachs and Stifel. The co-managers are Pacific Crest Securities, BMO Capital Markets, Needham and Raymond James.

 

Based in Morrisville, North Carolina, ChannelAdvisor provides software-as-a-service solutions for retailer and manufacturer customers to integrate, manage and optimize their merchandise sales across hundreds of online channels. The company’s platform enables its customers to connect with new and existing sources of demand for their products, including e-commerce marketplaces such as eBay, Amazon and Newegg; search engines and comparison shopping websites such as Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and Nextag, and emerging channels such as Facebook and Groupon. ChannelAdvisor was formed in 2001. It has about 432 employees.

 

ChannelAdvisor plans to sell all the stock in the offering and to have about 20.5 million shares outstanding after the offering.

Ply Gem Holdings plans to price 15.8 million shares of Class A Common Stock at $18 to $20 each on Wednesday evening. The IPO is expected to start trading on Thursday morning on the New York Stock Exchange under the proposed symbol “PGEM.” The joint-lead managers are J.P. Morgan, Credit Suisse, Goldman Sachs, UBS Investment Bank and Deutsche Bank Securities. The co-managers are Zelman Partners, BB&T Capital Markets and Stephens.

 

Based in Cary, North Carolina, Ply Gem is a supplier of exterior building materials used in home construction and renovation. The company offers vinyl siding, fencing, stone veneer, windows and doors to the new construction market and the home repair and remodeling markets in the United States and Western Canada.

 

Ply Gem plans to sell all the stock in the offering and to have about 64.8 million shares outstanding after the offering.

 

Constellium Holdco B.V. (CSTM – proposed) is a Netherlands-based provider of specialty rolled and extruded aluminum products, serving primarily the aerospace, packaging and automotive end-markets.

 

Global Brass and Copper Holdings (BRSS – proposed) is a Schaumburg, Illinois-based value-added converter, fabricator, distributor and processor of specialized copper and brass products in North America.

 

Portola Pharmaceuticals (PTLA – proposed) is a South San Francisco-based biopharmaceutical company focusing on developing novel therapeutics in the areas of thrombosis, other hematologic disorders and inflammation for patients.

 

This brings us to next week. At press time, there was one deal on the IPO calendar for the week of May 27, 2013, which is a week cut short by the Memorial Day break.

 

Stay tuned. 

 

 

 

For the IPO market, though, investors fixated on just one figure: Zero. There were no deals priced and no IPO filings in October. That’s no mystery, considering the chaos in the overall stock market. (More on that later.)

 

The last trading day of the month just happened to be Halloween. By Friday’s closing bell, the DJIA wrapped up the month of October with a loss of 14.1 percent. (For the day, though, the Dow closed higher and finished the final week of October with an 11.3 percent gain.)

 

During the month of October, the Dow gave us what some Wall Street pros might call an old-fashioned “selling climax.” That came on Oct. 10 when the DJIA hit an intraday low of 7,773 and racked up a volume of almost 11.5 billion shares – a single-day record.

 

Here’s why people may have overlooked this event.

 

The DJIA closed at 8,451 on Oct. 10, a then-closing low for 2008, and DOWN 128 points from 8,579, its close on Oct, 9. A hundred-point loss and a new closing low barely raised an eyebrow in today’s extremely volatile market.

 

This is where it gets interesting. From the DJIA’s intraday high on Oct. 9 of 9,261 to its intraday low of 7,773 on the following day, the Dow had declined 1,749 points -– an astounding drop of 18.8 percent. Then figure in the record trading volume of 11.5 billion shares.

 

After hitting a low, you can usually expect the market to bounce back a bit and then turn down to test the previous low. That’s already happened.

 

From the DJIA’s intraday high set on Oct. 1 of 11,022 to its intraday low of 7,773 on Oct. 10, the blue-chip average plummeted 3,249 points –- a loss of 29.5 percent. From that low point, the DJIA rallied and then sold off to close at its 2008 low on Monday, Oct. 27, at 8,175.

 

What a difference a week makes. On Friday, Oct. 31, the Dow closed at 9,325.

 

It’s too early to say that Wall Street is out of the woods, but we are already in a correction phase of a bear market. A 10 percent recovery from the Dow’s previous closing low would put it at 8,993. To recap, the Dow closed on Friday at 9,325.

 

To break out into a bull market, a 20 percent recovery would put the Dow at 9,810 — or less than 500 points from Friday’s close.

 

October’s IPO market took a vacation. No deals were priced, no IPOS were filed and 12 companies withdrew plans to go public, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

 

The financial press has reported extensively, quoting various sources, that today’s IPO traffic looks much like 1974 and 1975 when nothing was priced. That’s true. You can see for yourself.

 

Please be advised that IPOScoop.com has shared its data bank with most of these quoted sources. Here’s a bonus for The IPO Buzz newsletter subscribers. Please open the attachment. It is an Excel spreadsheet breaking down the monthly and yearly IPO traffic beginning with January 1970.