Brace Yourself for Buy.com’s Return

Buy.com filed plans to return to the public markets on Tuesday, and investors had better hope the company’s timing is off this time around.

Buy.com went public in February 2000 at $13 a share — a month before the Nasdaq peaked. Founder Scott Blum took the company private for 17 cents a share in November 2001 — a month after many e-commerce stocks bottomed.

Now the company is going public again, with Internet stocks already 15% off their highs.

If the Buy.com indicator works again, stocks will peak a month after the company goes public and head into another bear market.

Here’s hoping Buy.com is early this time. By quite a bit.

Stocks finally bounced on Tuesday, buoyed by strong blue chip earnings, a rebound in consumer confidence, and stronger than expected growth in China, but the indexes finished off their best levels of the day.

The Nasdaq climbed 11 to 2019, the S&P 500 rose 4 to 1168, and the Dow gained 92 to 10,461. Volume rose to 1.61 billion shares on the NYSE, but declined to 2 billion on the Nasdaq. Advancers led 17-16 on the NYSE, and 16-13 on the Nasdaq. Upside volume was 55% on the NYSE, and 67% on the Nasdaq. New highs-new lows were 83-19 on the NYSE, and 43-67 on the Nasdaq.

Earnings reports were pretty sound after the close: Texas Instruments , Cymer , CA , Avaya , StorageTek , Flextronics , Hyperion , Red Envelope and CSG beat estimates, and Corning met estimates.

During the day, Corio soared on news that it will be acquired by IBM .

Netflix , Imation , JDA , Altera , Silicon Labs and Sybase rose on their resuts.

EMC , BellSouth , FileNet and Silicon Image fell on their results.

palmOne and Brocade tumbled on news of changes at the top.