Tanker Stocks II: Some IPOs Worth Watching

Wednesday's Wall Street Journal crunched the numbers on the past couple of years' tech IPOs. And just as you'd expect, the result was ugly. The deals underwritten by the four worst-performing investment banks are down an average of more than 50% -- and that's apparently from the offering price, not the much-higher price that most of these stocks hit on their first day of trading.

But you have to be careful about drawing the wrong conclusion here. Just because so many tech IPOs were losers in 2000 doesn't mean all IPOs are bad news. Like anything else, some are disasters waiting to happen, and some are good, solid companies that should do just fine.

Examples of the latter might be the IPOs (one just completed, others soon to be) of several oil tanker companies. I did a column on the current fleet of tanker stocks in February, and the story still looks solid. Global oil demand is up, and should remain so, while new regulations are forcing older single-hulled tankers into retirement at a time when shipyard capacity is too tight to completely offset the resulting decline in capacity. As a result, the tanker companies with mostly new ships should make good money right through this year's recession, and great money in the expansion that follows. ...