China’s Debuts Hark Back to Late ’90s – Wall Street Journal

China now seems to be where the US was in the late 1990s, stock market-wise. From the Wall Street Journal:

The Chinese market for new stock offerings is starting to look a lot like the U.S. in the late 1990s.

In those days, hotly sought-after initial public offerings of tech companies — like Ask Jeeves Inc., GeoCities Inc. or Red Hat Inc. — exploded out of the starting gate, doubling, tripling and more on their first days of trading.

Something similar is happening in China now. The average first-day return for Chinese IPOs in 2007 is 192%, according to data from Thomson Financial. The performance is a little more modest for large offerings. For the 10 deals that raised more than $1 billion, the first-day gain has averaged 83%. [Full Text]