The IPO Buzz: A Red-Hot July

July started with some IPO fireworks before the Independence Day holiday. One IPO scored a moonshot. But the story behind the news was at the SEC’s filing window, where the line looked like cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic headed for the Jersey Shore. Just two deals are on this week’s IPO Calendar. (We’ll get to those in a minute.)

Lemonade (LMND) delivered a sweet treat in its NASDAQ debut on Thursday, July 2^nd,. The stock closed on Thursday at $69.41 – up 139.34 percent from $29, where the IPO was priced on Wednesday night, July 1^st. A moonshot occurs when an IPO gains 100 percent or more – doubling its IPO price or climbing higher – in its first day of trading.  Lemonade is a New York-based start-up that operates a digital platform to sell renters’ and homeowners’ insurance in the United States and Europe.

For the record, Lemonade was among seven companies that went public last week. Bankers raised a total of $3.34 billion. Dun & Bradstreet Holdings (DNB) accounted for more than half of the week’s total volume, raising $1.72 billion in its IPO – its second turn as a publicly traded company. Four of the seven deals priced last week were unit offerings, including three blank checks or special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs) and one small healthcare deal.

Fifteen companies filed plans to go public last week, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission records showed. Twelve of those companies rushed up to the SEC’s filing window on Thursday, the last business day in a four-day work week cut short by the federal holiday on Friday in observance of the U.S. Independence Day, also known as the Fourth of July. (The federal holiday is on a Friday when the Fourth of July falls on a Saturday as it did this year.)

Why these stats matter: Heavy traffic at the SEC’s filing window indicates a steady flow of IPOs over the next several weeks, assuming that the U.S. stock market stays healthy.

One deal was postponed last week. DoubleDown Interactive, the South Korean digital gaming company, was pulled from the IPO launch pad after it slashed the deal’s size when the selling shareholder stepped away from the offering. The old Wall Street saying applies:  “Cut a deal. Cancel my order.”

Two IPOs This Week

This week’s IPO Calendar has only two names on it at press time. One is an LGBTQ play in China and other Asian countries. The other is an American biotech focused on cancer drugs.

Let’s take a look at these two deals, organized by pricing and trading dates.

Tuesday evening pricing for Wednesday trading:

BlueCity Holdings (BLCT proposed), based in Beijing, is China’s most prominent online community for LGBTQ people. In the prospectus, the company says: “Our story started in the year 2000, when our founder, Mr. Baoli Ma, a closeted policeman (who went) by the alias ‘Geng Le,’ founded one of China’s first and most influential LGBTQ online forums, Danlan.org.” That entity, Danlan.org, is the predecessor of BlueCity, the prospectus says, “and Mr. Ma is our number one employee.”

In 2001, the year after BlueCity’s predecessor was created, homosexuality was removed from an official list of mental illness in China, according to the prospectus,

This is an IPO of 5.3 million American Depositary Shares (ADS) at $15 to $17 each on the NASDAQ.

Thursday evening pricing for Friday trading:

Nkarta (NKTX proposed), based in South San Francisco, is a biopharma company focused on the discovery, development and commercialization of allogenic off-the-shelf engineered natural killer, or NK, cell therapies to treat cancer.

This is an IPO of 10 million shares at $14 to $16 each on the NASDAQ.

(For more information about these companies, please check the IPO profiles on IPOScoop.com.)

If the recent trend holds, more names could pop onto this week’s IPO Calendar when the SEC’s filing window opens again for business on Monday, July 6^th. For instance, at this time last week, there were five deals on the IPO Calendar. That number expanded to eight early in the week.

Week of July 13^th

For the second week of July, the IPO Calendar is blank. That could change quickly on Monday morning when the SEC’s filing window swings open again after the long holiday weekend.

Stay tuned.

Disclosure: Neither the author nor anyone else on the IPOScoop.com staff has a position in any stocks mentioned, nor do we trade or invest in IPOs. The author and IPOScoop.com staff do not issue advice, recommendations or opinions.