Four companies are slated to hit the exchanges this week — a bit of a slowdown from previous weeks, but still continuing a bustling time for the IPO market. Wall Street has launched 22 offerings in May alone — representing the best volume since 2007 — though investors have looked at these deals with mixed enthusiasm.

Case in point, last week’s IPO returns: Company Ticker Offering Price Return Marketo MKTO $13.00 +89% Tableau Software DATA $31.00 +70% UBIC UBIC $8.38 +7% William Lyon Homes WLH $25.00 +6% Tallgrass Energy TEP $21.50 +3% Trade Street Residential TSRE $10.00 -7% Ambit Biosciences AMBI $8.00 -15% Average — — +22%

Still, you can expect more deals in the offing. Eight more companies are lined up to go public in May, which according to Renaissance Capital, means this month “could be the first since May 2007 to see 30 pricings. No month has had more than 30 IPO pricings since October 2004.” Read 

Tomorrow is the one-year anniversary for the Facebook (FB) IPO … though many investors might not want to remember it.

Shares are down about 31% in that time, compared to a 19% gain for the Dow Jones Industrial Average and a 22% jump in the S&P 500. That’s right — you would’ve done better plunking your money into humdrum companies like General Electric (GE) or Clorox (CLX).

That isn’t to say Facebook has been a completely lost cause. The company has gotten back on track to some extent, improving its revenues last quarter by 36% thanks to an improved focus on monetizing mobile, which went from nothing to 30% of revenues during the past 12 months. Read 

Tableau Software (DATA), which provides software for analyzing trends and data, might not be a household name, but it certainly caught the eyes of Wall Street on Friday.

Ahead of today’s initial public offering, Tableau boosted its transaction from a range of $23 to $26 to a range of $28 to $30, and also increased the number of shares issued from 7.2 million to 8.2 million.

Tableau ended up pricing the deal at $31 to raise $254 million, then investors bid shares up as much as 60% in the first few hours of Friday trading. Read 

Initial public offerings are back with a vengeance…or so it seems. This year alone we’ve seen 64 companies go public, raising a combined total of $16.8 billion. That means that U.S. IPOs are on track to have their busiest year since before the financial crisis.

In the past few months, we’ve seen several new faces on Wall Street, including Seaworld Entertainment (SEAS) and Duncan Hines’ owner Pinnacle Foods (PF). And just last month, the insurance unit of Banco de Brasil–BB Seguridade–raised $4.25 billion, making it the largest IPO this year so far.

So far, a lot of these big names have performed decently since their launch date–SEAS is up 11% while PF is up 14%. So now that it has been a full year since the volatile Facebook (FB) IPO, have IPOs finally found their stride? Read 

“The Facebook IPO will be a dud.”

Had you said the words a few months before Facebook‘s (NASDAQ:FB) much-anticipated initial public offering in May 2012, you might have gotten a few dirty looks or laughs. While it was easy to see the company would have some issues coming public, the disaster that actually followed — its first-day glitch, the Morgan Stanley (NYSE:MS) fiasco, its four-month halving, its current -30% return — was the last thing anyone expected.

The impact was big — far bigger than Facebook. As I mentioned in a recent article, it all but killed off any hunger for social offerings, and the size of IPOs just hasn’t been the same. Read 

Anyone covering the IPO beat would be hard-pressed to find many more exciting times than the one surrounding the Facebook (NASDAQ:FB) public offering.

Ahead of the Facebook IPO on May 18, 2012, hype was at a fever pitch, causing the company to boost both its price range and shares issued. At launch, Facebook was a $104 billion company that raised a whopping $16 billion, cementing the IPO bronze with history’s third-largest offering behind Visa (NYSE:V) and Enel SpA (OTC:ENLAY).

And then the bottom fell out. Read