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HONG KONG: Hong Kong’s initial public offerings (IPOs) have suffered their worst start since 2009, failing to ride a stock market rally and forcing bankers in Asia’s main centre for new issues to pin their hopes on a US$700mil oil sands company offering to throw open the floodgates.

A nearly 16% rally in the local stock market since the beginning of the year should have given executives confidence to proceed with stock listings, and allowed bankers to clear their deal backlog and sign up more clients to hit the IPO track.

Instead, companies with offerings on the docket remain on the sidelines. The few that are proceeding are planning deeper discounts and resorting to shadow books’ to make sure the deals are infallible.

The lack of activity is both a grim sign of CEO confidence and also a potentially dire warning for investment bankers in Asia, where equity capital market fees make up about two-thirds of the investment banking revenues at most firms, according to Thomson Reuters data.

“Investors are very choosy and will continue to be very choosy,” said Philippe Espinasse, a former investment banker with Nomura and UBS in Hong Kong and author of IPO: a Global Guide.

Nearly half of the up to US$700mil IPO of Sunshine Oilsands, a Canadian oil explorer, has been sold to powerful Chinese state-backed entities, leaving little room for the deal to collapse.

However, a truly thriving IPO market is one where retail and mutual fund investors queue up to buy shares, something that is still missing in Hong Kong because of lingering concerns over Europe’s debt troubles and a slowdown in China’s economy.

Besides signing up so-called cornerstone investors, who commit to buying a chunk of the IPO and keeping their stake for a minimum period of time, bankers will sometimes also run a shadow book’ when the market is weak, such as now.

The term refers to a roster of potential buyers that gives an early indication as to what demand will be before banks finalise a price range and launch the IPO.

The shadow book gives banks and the IPO company some comfort to go ahead, or not, with the deal, as was the case with Sunshine Oilsands.

“It’s particularly important in a market like this. In a bull market you just launch and go,” said the head of equity capital markets (ECM) at an international investment bank in Hong Kong who was not authorised to speak publicly on the matter and thus requested anonymity.

The slump in issuance is a particular cause for concern in the financial industry after estimated fees on Asia-Pacific offerings tumbled 21% to US$4.9bil in 2011 from 2010, prompting companies, including Royal Bank of Scotland and Samsung Securities Co Ltd, to slash jobs or pull out altogether from the equities business in the region. – Reuters

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Peter Lynch, former ­manager of the Fidelity Magellan fund, preached to investors to buy what you know. He got his hair trimmed at Supercuts; ergo, he bought shares of Supercuts. Lynch’s philosophy figures in the buzz about the pending Facebook IPO. Safe to say ­almost everyone reading these words has an account or at least knows people who do. (Or maybe you’ve seen the movie.) In a few months the social ­network is going to sell shares to the public for the first time, providing an opportunity to own a slice of what will instantly become one of the world’s most highly valued companies.

Sure is tempting. Facebook, after all, is growing like kudzu. It has 850 million users. In 2011 it generated $3.7 billion in revenue, up 88%, and netted $1 billion. Speculation on The Street has been that Facebook will come public with a $75 billion to $100 billion ­valuation. And I have every confidence that come IPO day, the stock will pop like it’s 1999.

Enjoy the fireworks. But I wouldn’t buy it.

Investing is about choices. If you buy this, you’re not buying that. If you invest in Facebook at a seriously stretched valuation, you are going to be passing up on some far more attractive alternatives.

Assuming Facebook comes public at a $100 billion market cap, the stock will debut at 27 times last year’s revenues and 100 times trailing profits. By either measure, an ethereal valuation.

My advice? Forget Facebook. Buy Apple ( AAPL – news – people ) and Microsoft ( MSFT – news – people ). Neither company is exactly undiscovered. Apple recently crossed $500 for the first time and is nearing a half-trillion-dollar valuation. Microsoft recently hit the $30 level for the first time since 2010; with a $250 billion valuation, it is the second-most-valuable tech company.

But both stocks are bargains.

Let’s start with Apple. In Q4, while Facebook’s revenue rose 54.7%, Apple’s grew 73.4%. Despite a recent rally Apple’s rapid growth makes it statistically cheap. In calendar 2011 Apple had revenue of $127.8 billion and profits of $33 billion. At $500 it trades at 3.9 times trailing revenue and 15 times trailing profits. Back out the $100 billion it has in cash, and the valuation drops to 3.1 times revenues and 12 times earnings. And there are all kinds of coming catalysts for the stock: new iPhones, new iPads, new Macs, TVs and potentially a big fat dividend. You almost have to own this stock.

Microsoft is cheap, too, at 11 times trailing 12-month earnings, cheaper still if you back out its $57 billion in cash. (Which, by the way, does not include the company’s equity in a certain red-hot social networking company about to come public.) The software giant hasn’t been growing like Apple, but this is going to be a big year for it, with Windows 8 due out soon. This is a major upgrade for the trusty OS–the biggest since Windows 95.

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Are you sick of the way your Android phone organizes your text messages? The innovative and free Powow: Text Messaging app for Android is a fabulous new way to organize your text messages just by downloading this modern and fun text app.

Features abound in this free text messaging Android offering. A home screen widget is perfect for scrolling through your 20 most recent text messages. Pop-up notifications allow you to see entire text messages without closing out of the app you are engrossed in currently. Pop-up text messages, how fantastic! You can ignore, delete or review the pop-up as you wish.

Tired of that friend who won’t stop texting you but don’t know how to say STOP? Set up your “Blacklist” with this app to block those text messages from popping-up. You can also mute notifications for certain senders so you won’t get interruptions from non-important text messengers. The Powow app is the classy way to block your friends via text message.

The Powow app also makes it super easy to attach pictures, videos, audio, ringtones and even slideshows to your text messages. And, have emoticons always escaped you? Never fear, with this Android app you get access to easily insert fun and crazy emoticons into your text messages. You can also speak your text message if you are too lazy to type at the moment.

With so many features on offer, you’ll definitely want to get this Android app and enhance your text messging experience.

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