By my count, 10 different biotech companies have gone public in the past couple of months.

Surprisingly, five of them still are trading above their IPO pricing. That’s a track record much better than the market’s average, almost lending hope to investors looking to cash in on the tantalizing (alleged) upside of a new public offering; the inherent (and also usually alleged) bullishness behind a novel new drug is just a little gravy.

Despite a decent run for 2013’s biotech public offerings, though, IPOs generally remain bad for your portfolio for the first full year or so of their trading. Read 

During the financial crisis of 2008, Restoration Hardware (RH) went private and launched a grueling restructure that led the furniture retailer to dump many of its mall locations and put its focus on Design Galleries.

That move turned out to be spot-on.

By November 2012, RH was primed to head back to the public markets and executed a highly successful IPO. Priced at $24, the stock ended its first day of trading up 29%, and has since more than doubled to its current price above $56. Read 

One of the worries accompanying the spike in market volatility of the past couple weeks was that the IPO market would feel some pressure, too. However, things have held up fairly well. While Colony American Homes postponed its offering, so far, it remains an isolated case — investors might just be skeptical about the leasing business model for single-family homes. Also, there are concerns that the IRS might get tougher on regulations for applying to become a real estate investment trust.

Despite all this, two offerings that did quite well last week: Textura (TXTR, +39%) and LightInTheBox (LITB, +32%). Only RCS Capital (RCAP) had an iffy performance, off by about 3%.

For the upcoming week, three companies are ready to come public, with major global fragrance player Coty (COTY) likely to see the most attention: Read 

Wisconsin might not seem like the place for a hot biotech company, but its capital, Madison, is home to the headquarters of a top operator in the stem-cell production market, Cellular Dynamics International.

And thanks to a recent IPO filing, it’ll soon be home to a publicly traded Cellular Dynamics.

One of CDI’s co-founders, James Thomson, is a pioneer in the stem-cell field and sports a stunning resume. He currently is the Director of Regenerative Biology at the Morgridge Institute for Research and the John D. MacArthur Professor of Anatomy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Some of his breakthroughs include the isolation of human ES and iPS cells, as well as the collaborative mapping of the human epigenome. Throughout his career, he has published more than 150 scientific, peer-reviewed papers and has been granted 30 patents. Read 

Italian automaker Fiat SpA (FIATY) has been getting its financial ducks in a row lately as it prepares to acquire the remaining stake in Chrysler Group LLC — a move that could set the stage for an initial public offering by the end of this year.

Fiat, which already owns 58.5% of the Detroit automaker, is looking to purchase the remaining stake — a deal that reports say would fall in the $4 billion range.

To that end, Fiat has kicked off a massive three-part refinancing plan aimed at taking advantage of favorable current interest rates to lower the cost of existing Fiat and Chrysler loans. The loans that would be refinanced include $2.6 billion in Fiat loans and a $3 billion, six-year syndicated term loan Chrysler took out in May 2011. Read 

Because of the holiday last week, the IPO market was fairly slow. Only two transactions took place — both biotech operators — but they performed quite well. So far, Epizyme (EPZM) has soared 64% from its offering price while Kamada (KMDA) has climbed almost 11%.

As for this week, the activity is set to pick up a bit. In all, four deals will hit the market, while two of those could be especially nice winners. Let’s take a look: Colony American Homes

First up is Colony American Homes (CAHS), a real estate investment trust (REIT) that owns, operates and leases single-family properties. The size of the portfolio is nearly 10,000 homes and the locations include areas like Arizona, California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Texas and more. Read