Dole Foods, Hyatt Hotels, Railway America, and Dollar General, all owned by private equity firms, are set to launch public offerings in the next few weeks.

“In 2008, private equity was persona non grata,” says Sweet. “In 2009 they are coming back, but IPO buyers are not putting up with the nonsense of them bringing heavily indebted, unprofitable companies that they basically bought 12 months ago and threw in some new management.”

As Sweet’s comment illustrates, the market for IPOs has not been equally good to every company. One company that debuted last week, A123 systems, a Watertown, Massachusetts-based maker of lithium batteries for cars, far exceeded expectations. Even though the company is unprofitable, its share price rose more than 50 percent after its debut on the Nasdaq.

But Chinese computer-game producer Shanda Games closed down 14 percent from its opening price of $12.50 a share on the first day of trading. The company managed to raise $1.04 billion and was 10 times oversubscribed, but investors were put off by the fact that the company sold 20 million shares more than originally planned.

Two commercial real estate investment trusts, Apollo Commercial Real Estate Finance Inc. and Colony Financial, both cut in half the size of their IPOs due to limited demand.

“Our takeaway from last week was that investors want to see upside in these IPOs, and they want to see it manifest itself pretty quickly for the risk that they feel they are taking by investing in a company like that,” Cummings said.

Cummings added that he believed that financial-services companies would increasingly resort to the IPO market. For example, Artio Global Investors, the U.S. asset management arm of Swiss bank Julius Baer Holding, was taken public in an IPO last week and finished up 4.8 percent on its first day of trading.

“I think the big difference today is most companies have demonstrated that they have access to the capital markets,” Cummings said. “Now that they have demonstrated that they do have access, I think it takes away one of the key elements of uncertainty surrounding the financials. So I don’t think someone raising capital today is encountering some of the same challenges that they might have faced three or four months ago.”