"The IPO Class of 2011: An Annotated Guide" (Five largest)

The Wall Street Journal's Deal Journal blog has been on fire this week, enough so that I am perilously close to breaking our loosely enforced "One link per source per day" rule.
Here's an example:

Yes, 2011 was another year of IPO blahs. Two-thirds of newly public companies are underwater while the stock market is flat, companies had to scrape and claw to go public after July and proceeds from IPOs trailed last year’s levels.

Deal Journal is digging deeper into the biggest U.S.-listed offerings from the IPO class of 2011, to give you an annotated guide to the high-profile stock debuts.

Here are the five-biggest IPOs listed in the U.S. this year, ranked by the amount of money raised in the first batch of stock sales.

1) HCA Holdings, March/$4.35 Billion
2) Kinder Morgan, February/$3.29 Billion
3) Nielsen, Jan./$1.9 Billion

The three biggest IPOs of the year were buyout-boom babies during the 2005 to 2007 bubble for private-equity takeovers. The 2006 takeover of HCA was the third-biggest buyout deal of alltime at $21 billion, and then it became the biggest-ever IPO of a company owned by PE firms....MORE