Filed under: American Express (AXP), MasterCard Inc’A’ (MA), Initial public offerings

One of the years most touted and anticipated IPOs is sure to be that of Visa. The credit card company has filed for the IPO and investors were eagerly awaiting the debut. That was until yesterday. News from American Express Co. (NYSE: AXP) that customers are having trouble paying back loans, and paying off monthly payments on their credit card debt, sent the stock down over 10%. MasterCard Inc. (NYSE: MA) stock dropped more than 8% on the bad news as well.

With the stock market taking it on the chin, and now this bit of bad news in their industry, will we see the planned offering delayed? I think there is a fair chance that there will be a delay. The IPO market usually takes time to recover from a market beating of this sort. Investors are usually a bit gun-shy to pull the trigger on some new hi-tech issue. Visa on the other hand is not going to be your typical IPO. The company is obviously going to have a market cap in the tens of billions of dollars, and institutions will want a piece of the company. Still, that being said, they will want to have the same type of IPO that MasterCard had last year, and I would expect the underwriters to hold this offering until we see some continued market strength.

Aaron Katsman is the lead Portfolio Manager and Managing Director of America Israel Investment Associates, LLC. and Senior Editor of IsraelNewsletter.com. DISCLOSURE: Writer has no positions in any stock mentioned as of 1/12/08

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 13th, 2008 at 11:52 am and is filed under Stocks Money News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.