THE DAY AHEAD: After August's barrage, IPO market takes a nap

The great all-you-can-eat IPO experiment went over with a resounding thud. And now it's time for the IPO market's summer siesta.

Through Aug. 15, 56 IPOs priced and the returns were spotty. The busiest period was the week of Aug. 7, when a whopping 29 companies went public. Many of the IPOs were about even with their offering prices with others trading at a slight premium. That poor performance has been the norm for August's IPO binge.

"There were too many companies coming out, and the market wasn't ready," said David Menlow, president for IPOfinancial.com.

So why the glut of IPOs? Menlow said it was a case of now or never. "If these companies didn't go public now, there was a risk that they weren't going to," he said.

As for the rest of August, the IPO calendar is basically empty -- must be that herd of investment bankers and Wall Street types stampeding to the exits. Discerning IPO investors have clearly gotten their fill of new issues.

Investors also have to get over that August aftertaste. Companies such as Lexar Media (Nasdaq: LEXR), which makes digital film, and Synquest (Nasdaq: SYNQ), a supply chain software company, priced below their IPO price ranges even after lowering terms dramatically. When shares began trading, the response was shaky.

Other IPOs wound up running in place. ScreamingMedia.com (Nasdaq: SCRM), Giganet (Nasdaq: GIGN) and ChipPAC (Nasdaq: CHPC), a company with real profits and revenue, are about flat with their offering prices. And that AOL Latin America (Nasdaq: AOLA) had a great name, but no backing with investors. The company's shares were below its already lowered IPO price.

And the really unfortunate IPOs were hammered. iAsiaWorks (Nasdaq: IAWK) clearly didn't work for investors and fell 30 percent through Aug. 18. The PeoplePC (Nasdaq: PEOP) IPO was a disaster from the beginning.

There were a couple IPO stars, but they were rare. Enterprise storage company McData (Nasdaq: MCDT), a spinoff from EMC Corp. (NYSE: EMC), was the one of the standouts, with an aftermarket gain topping 200 percent.

Not only did McData have a good pedigree, it also had profits. For the six months ending June 30, the company reported a profit of $9.6 million on sales of $106 million.

SpeechWorks International (Nasdaq: SPWX) also logged a gain of more than 200 percent from its Aug. 1 IPO. The speech recognition software company lost $6.6 million on sales of $6 million in its second quarter. Blue Martini (Nasdaq: BLUE) also logged a gain of more than 200 percent as of Aug. 18.

Given August's IPO glut, it's clearly time for a vacation. As for the fall, Menlow said new companies with better fundamentals should emerge. "In the fall, we're looking for a market that is a little bit more robust," he said.

The week ahead