Chris Nerney

If I were any of eBay’s competitors, I’d dump as much money as I could into a marketing blitz right now. RIGHT NOW. Because the champ’s knees are wobbly. The ongoing outage disaster at eBay’s online auction site that began last Wednesday and spilled into Sunday could permanently cost the company thousands of customers, millions […]

A reader sent an e-mail this week complaining about poor service from online broker Wit Capital, which offered its own IPO last Friday. “I have an account there, and tried twice to buy IPO shares, but was blocked,” the reader writes. Worse, he adds, “they never answer my emails, faxes, letters. If you call, you […]

In a recent column analyzing the debut performance of Internet IPOs launched last month, I noted that the average first-day closing price of Net stocks that went public in May was well below the average from previous months this year. Now, as we head into mid-June, 22 of the 26 Internet stocks that began trading […]

Will it take a doctor to revive the stricken Internet IPO market? Probably not, but celebrity-branded health information Web site drkoop.com did its best Tuesday to reverse the trend of declining first-day gains for Internet IPOs, closing trading at $16.44, an 83% increase over its $9 offer price. While hardly reminiscent of the triple-digit debuts […]

Bill Gates reportedly has said the competitor that keeps him awake nights isn’t one of other high-tech giants doing battle with Microsoft, but rather the garage start-up he hasn’t yet heard of. Back in 1993, Red Hat Inc., then known as ACC Corp., was one of those companies. Last Friday the leading seller of Linux […]

The days of the jacked-up offer price for Internet IPOs seem to be over for now, if recent pricings are any indication. Whereas the past few months have seen numerous companies go for the kill by dramatically raising their offer prices on the eve of the IPO, none of the five Internet companies that went […]

Maybe they’ve been so busy preparing paperwork and dreaming about stock options that they just haven’t noticed. Despite a spring swoon that has ravaged ‘Net stock prices and gutted the after-market performance of most of the sector’s IPOs, Internet companies continue to file registration papers for public offerings at a frenetic pace. It’s almost as […]

A week after a precedent-setting day for Internet IPOs, two new offerings will test the roiled waters. Web services vendor iXL Enterprises and Internet broker onlinetradinginc.com priced shares Wednesday. iXL began trading just before noon and was up 7-23/32 to 19-23/32 in mid-afternoon trading. Onlinetradinginc.com should begin trading later Thursday. While the one-week drought between […]

In much the same way that software start-ups proclaim Microsoft’s incursion into their market “validates” their vision, Internet competitors of Merrill Lynch greeted the brokerage giant’s announcement Tuesday that it will offer discount online trading later this year with a mixture of smugness and false bravado. Investors weren’t fooled, however. The stock prices of other […]

That last month saw a big drop-off in the average first-day performance of Internet IPOs is no surprise to market watchers. What might be surprising, however, is how bad it really was, as reflected by the numbers. There were 26 Internet IPOs in May, a record total that easily surpasses the previous high of 17 […]

The Memorial Day weekend provides welcome relief from a frenetic and frightful month for Internet stocks and IPOs. May was notable for three things: A downturn in the prices of Internet stocks so severe that even Internet bulls started to wonder if the so-called bubble was in the process of bursting; A record number of […]

After Wednesday’s sobering showing of Internet IPOs, don’t be surprised to see a number of companies begin to bail out of plans to go public. Two of the five Internet companies that launched IPOs Wednesday – Juno Online Services and ZipLink – saw their stocks close the day below their respective offer prices. And a […]