New York Stock Exchange and Alibaba Group Holding

Alibaba Group Holding: These days IPO investors are more likely to get in somewhere around the sixth floor, when companies are well beyond infancy and maybe approaching middle age. Alibaba Group Holding, the Chinese Internet giant, is a case in point. Founder Jack Ma has waited 15 years to take it public, raising money along the way from Yahoo! and SoftBank 9984:JP . The companys IPO on the New York Stock Exchange later this year could value it at $150 billion, making it the biggest in U.S. history, according to Business Week. Since 2001, companies have had an average age of 11 at the time of their U.S. IPOs, compared with 5 at the peak of the dot-com bubble in 1999-2000 and 7 to 9 in the previous two decades, according to Jay Ritter, a University of Florida finance professor. $150b Initial public offerings used to offer investors chances to get in on the ground floor of young, fast-growing companies. There was risk, of course, but also the possibility of enormous rewards. Amazon.com went public in May 1997, less than three years after it was incorporated, and has since returned almost 24,000 percent to people who got in at the IPO price. The size of recent IPOs is a sign that companies are stretching the limits on how big they can get while remaining private. It used to be rare to spot a tech company that had a valuation of $1 billion based on private investments, but now we re sighting unicorns everywhere, says Kate Mitchell, managing director at Scale Venture Partners. (news.financializer.com). As reported in the news.