Too Many Biotech IPOs?

It's worth noting, on the business end of things, that we seem to be in a boom period for biotech/small pharma IPOs. I don't think anyone saw that coming, but these things take on momentum of their own. Hardly anyone went public for a few years once the financial crisis hit in 2007/2008. Then last year there were eleven new public companies, the most in quite a while. This year, though, there have been 29 (according to this piece in FierceBiotech), with eight of them since just the end of June. That's pretty lively. And while some of this can be explained as a holdover from companies that would have gone public earlier, under less trying conditions, you'd have to think that we're getting near the bottom of the sack by now. Whatever gets pulled up at this point has a greater likelihood of having all kinds of stuff stuck to it, and it might not be in good enough condition for your portfolio to consume it. Soon we'll probably be in the part of the cycle where good companies, who would have happily launched themselves into the market a few months before, get whipsawed by a closing IPO window. If you think of a large flock of birds wheeling around in the sky, unable to quite decide which tree to land on, or whether to land at all, you'll have a pretty good mental picture of the market.
Source: In the Pipeline - Category: Chemists Tags: Business and Markets Source Type: blogs