Not bad, but it was difficult — if not impossible — for small investors to get a piece of that action. So I decided to take a look at Virginia's IPOs for 1999: Of eight public offerings by Virginia companies, four are up from the offering price and four are down.

That would seem to suggest that Virginia IPO investors had a 50-50 chance of making money this year. Not so. If they had bought 100 shares of each stock at the offering price, they would have spent $11,600. And by Nov. 9, their IPO portfolios would have been worth $23,886. They would have more than doubled their money despite the fact that half of their stocks went down. You can only lose 100 percent of an investment; there's much greater potential on the upside. On Nov. 9 Trex, which makes a wood-plastic hybrid decking product, was up 219 percent; Cysive, a software engineering company with an e-commerce spin, was up 264 percent; and Proxicom, an e-commerce, intranet and extranet developer, was up 633 percent.

"It's been an incredibly prolific year for IPOs across the board, but particularly in technology," says Philip Facchina, managing director and head of technology investment banking at Arlington-based Friedman Billings Ramsey. Not only have tech companies been rolling out of the gate in record numbers, but explosive pricing at the offering and afterward is sending sparks across the ticker.

Friedman Billings Ramsey was a co-manager on both the Proxicom and Cysive offerings. "Those companies really are in the thick of enabling companies to conduct businesses on the Internet," Facchina says. He notes that Proxicom has continued to trade up, even following a secondary offering in October. "Everybody believes technology is going to drive the 21st century, and capital markets have given a lot of latitude to allow people to develop business plans they think will drive the new economy."

The numbers are all the more interesting because these IPOs are more available to retail buyers. Public offerings used to be the province of institutional buyers. Now brokerages and securities companies — FBR.com among them — are putting individual investors on an equal footing by letting them in at the offering price.

There are two pending IPOs in the commonwealth. Arlington-based Tele-corp PCS Inc. (Nasdaq, TLCP) in October registered its intent to offer 7.8 million shares at $16 to $18 per share. The company has personal communications systems licenses covering eight of the country's 100 largest metro markets. AT&T is the largest investor — it contributed the PCS licenses and owns about 18 percent of the company. The tie with the long-distance giant gives Telecorp such benefits as AT&T branding, a big plus in the growing wireless market. Herndon-based Lifemind-ers.com Inc. (Nasdaq, LMIN) in late September registered its intent to go public. The company does direct marketing via e-mail.

"Looking at 2000, we would expect that the mid-Atlantic region, and Northern Virginia particularly, would be very exciting from an IPO standpoint," Facchina predicts. His company is already working with a number of e-commerce and Internet companies that are preparing to take themselves public. "If the capital markets stay healthy, we in the metro Washington area can look forward to a strong year."