Make us an initial public offer too good to refuse.

It has been a summer of love for initial public offerings, both in the UK and the US. In the UK alone, according to the London Stock Exchange, there had been 266 new companies joining the Alternative Investment Market index or the main FTSE indices through IPOs. Compare this to a total of 182 new companies floating in 2003 and 197 in 2002, and it could be argued that the IPO market is fast gaining pace. This figure, though, is not as grand as it was at the height of the dot.com boom, when 416 companies came into the market.

Most of the time retail investors cannot direc