Ipo, Initial Public Offering | featured news

Investors are gobbling up shares of pasta maker Annie's Inc., the latest sign of the pull of natural and organic foods for consumers. Best known for its signature macaroni and cheese with pasta shaped like rabbits, Annie's makes more than 125 organic and natural food products and is sold in more than 250,000 store locations, almost all in the U.S.

Michaels Stores, the arts and crafts retailer owned by the Blackstone Group and Bain Capital, plans to file to go public as soon as next week, in what could be one of the biggest initial public offerings of the year.

In a breakdown that resembled a mini version of the 2010 "flash crash," a series of blunders hit the market debut of BATS Global Markets Exchange Inc on Friday, causing the company to take the extremely rare step of withdrawing its initial public offering of shares.

Facebook will pay a fee of just 1.1 percent to underwriters of its initial public offering, a source with knowledge of the company's plans said on Monday.

The company that makes Fender guitars is going public with a $200 million IPO.

Consumer review website Yelp Inc's shares traded more than 60 percent above their initial public offering price in their market debut on Friday, as investors rushed to buy a piece of the growing local advertising market... Yelp's shares were trading up 62 percent at $24.60 on Friday morning. At that level, the company is valued at about $1.43 billion -- about 17 times its 2011 revenue.

Even with that infusion of money, California's legislative analyst says he thinks state revenue may be billions less than Gov. Brown has forecast. Facebook's eagerly anticipated Wall Street debut could pump nearly $2.5 billion into California coffers over the next five years, the state's top budget analyst said Monday.

It's likely that investors will see a first-day rise in Yelp's shares during its IPO this week, but the ability of the online review site to hold on to those debut gains is debatable.

Facebook Inc. could file papers for its initial public offering as early as this coming week, people familiar with the matter said, as anticipation mounts for what is likely to be one of the biggest debuts for a U.S. company.