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True. Funny thing that may or may not be a motivating factor. Except for Google and Facebook, a lot of recent IPOs are trading below their offer price. Maybe the bigger I-bank clients recognize this (even mutual funds) so they are buying at the pre-IPO in late financing rounds. However, they still need someone to buy at the IPO, and who better than Joe Public?

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The Google and FaceBook IPOs were considered a failure (by conventional wisdom standards). Of course, the money went to them and not the wall street bankers.

If the IPO holders had held on they would've made bank.

This always cracks me up. In reality they got the price correct and maximized the money that the company got for doing the IPO in the first place. The problem is that there is an expectation that IPO stocks will 'pop' and allow wall street to line their own pockets. Since they didn't, they consider it a failure.

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