Workday (WDAY), which operates a cloud platform for enterprise resource planning (ERP), had one of last year’s top IPOs. In October, the company issued shares at $28. As of now, the stock price is at $68.

That’s a huge run-up, so it poses a pretty obvious question: Can WDAY keep it up?

We’ll get a clue today when the company reports its first-quarter results. Unsurprisingly, the bar is fairly high. The Wall Street consensus is for revenue of $87 million and a net loss of 18 cents a share, compared to revenue of $43 million and a loss of 24 cents a share in the same period a year ago. Read 

Solar is dumb … as an investment, anyway.

Yes, someday technology will improve to the point where maybe — maybe — solar will pay for itself over time. Of course, it still will require enormous amounts of traditional fossil fuel energy to mine the silicon necessary to create solar panels, and to melt it — melting rock isn’t easy, by the way — and to keep panels from degrading in UV light. So that’s why I think investing in solar stocks as a true long-tern investment is dumb.

But today, I decided to look at a slightly different flavor in the solar sector, SolarCity (SCTY), to see what might be driving its stock performance. Read 

May has been a monster month for IPOs, with 22 deals hitting the market averaging a return of 13%.

But the party hasn’t been an equal one — a look into the offerings shows that the NYSE Euronext (NYX) has been the primary beneficiary. The Nasdaq OMX Group (NDAQ) has launched only eight of the month’s offerings, while the New York Stock Exchange has hosted 14, not including four more that are slated to go live this week.

That’s no fluke, either. Year-to-date, the NYSE has snagged 37 IPOs to the Nasdaq’s 26. Read 

As computing power gets more and more sophisticated, researchers are getting better data on the human genome, which has the potential to unlock many of our species’ secrets.

Banking on this is NanoString Technologies — one of the leaders in the space that has announced plans to go public.

Founded in 2003, NanoString is a spinoff of the Seattle-based Institute for Systems Biology. By leveraging extensive academic research, the company has gone on to develop next-generation machines that help analyze genomic information. Read 

Since Facebook (FB) came public about a year ago, deal-making in the social media space has been fairly sparse, whether in terms of IPOs or acquisitions. This week, though, we finally got an interesting deal: Yahoo’s (YHOO) $1.1 billion purchase of Tumblr.

Founded in 2007, Tumblr is a platform that makes it super easy for someone to create a social microblog. As of now, there are 184 million monthly unique visitors and many of them are fairly young. The company has also made great strides into mobile.

In other words, Tumblr could be big opportunity for Yahoo to boost growth and get some pizzazz. And, if you believe her, the company’s CEO Marissa Mayer also says that she promises not to “screw it up.” Read 

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