Seventeen initial public offerings have been priced so far in 2008, as of 21stMarch.

- 5 IPOs are currently trading above initial offering price;
- 10 are trading below the offering price;
- and 2 are trading at their offer price.

Two IPOs were priced during the week of October 29th, 2007. There are no deals on deck for the next week.

IPO PERFORMANCE

Visa Inc (V: chart) raised as much as $17.9 billion on Tuesday in the largest ever IPO in the United States. The shares opened up 35% and surged as much as 38% on Wednesday, their first day of trading.

The San Francisco-based company offered 406 million shares at $44 a share, well above the forecast range of $37 to $42.

J.P. Morgan, Goldman Sachs and Banc of America managed the deal.

On Thursday Visa’s bank underwriters bought another 40.6 million shares at the IPO price, to meet strong demand for the shares.

Visa is the world''s largest credit card network. It processed 32.7 billion transactions in fiscal 2007 compared with MasterCard Inc''s 18.7 billion in processed transactions.

The Visa IPO is the first bright spot this year for the U.S. IPO market.

The shares ended the week at $64.35 a share, up 46% from the offering price.

The health-care company, CardioNet also launched its IPO the previous week.

CardioNet, Inc. (BEAT: chart) on Wednesday priced at $18, below the expected range of $20 to $22 a share. The company offered 4.5 million shares in the offering. The company raised $81 in the offering.

3 million shares were offered by the company, while 1.5 million shares were offered by its shareholder Guidant Investment Corporation.

In addition, the selling stockholder has granted to the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to 675,000 additional shares to cover any over-allotments.

Citigroup was acting as the lead underwriter of the offering, supported by Lehman Brothers, Leerink Swann and Thomas Weisel.

The San Diego, California-based is the leading provider of ambulatory, continuous, real-time outpatient management solutions for monitoring relevant and timely clinical information regarding an individual''s health.

The shares ended the week at $18.02 almost unchanged from the offering price.