The first IPO of 2000, Talisman Enterprises , was a flop. It fell over 11 percent on its first trading day.

Oh, what a difference a year makes. On Thursday evening, January 14, 1999, Deutsche Banc Alex. Brown priced Marketwatch.com at $17 a share. The next day, the IPO became a legend when its 2.75 million shares opened at $69 each, hit a high of $129, then closed at $97.50, up 473.5 percent from its offering price. Its first-day volume was 9.775 million shares -- that's a turnover ratio of nearly four times the number of shares offered to investors. The stock market closed on January 15, 1999, at 2,348 as measured by the Nasdaq Composite, a then-record high.

For Marketwatch.com and the Nasdaq Composite, their paths to glory quickly parted. The first-day high of Marketwatch.com was it. For those unlucky enough to have actually bought the IPO at those lofty levels, it has been a long walk down the street of broken dreams. The stock now sells around $40 a share, down about 69 percent from its high-water mark a year ago. And the stock market? The Nasdaq Composite surged to a 4,069 year-end close.

OUT OF JUICE

On Thursday of last week, fearless investment banker Capital West Securities priced the Talisman IPO, the first of the year. And the deal didn't make any record books. Capital West Securities priced 900,000 shares of Talisman Enterprises at $5 each, reducing the deal in size from 1 million shares to get it done. That is never a good sign for a strong aftermarket performance.

Talisman is a Canadian battery manufacturer, and its IPO didn't light the world. The stock started trading on Friday, January 14, 2000, at $5.25 a share, sold to a $6-a-share high, and tumbled below issue price to close at $4.44, off 11.3 percent. Maybe the original investors who got stock at the offering price did OK in selling their holdings in the aftermarket. There was more than enough room to have dumped the stock, as a total of 1,049,900 shares were traded.

Last year's IPO market opened to a moonshot, and this year's new issue market opened to a mudshot. That's Wall Street for ya.

For a complete listing of upcoming deals, see our IPO calendar.

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