IPO Outlook for Friday, April 11: City Office, Paycom Software, Farmland Partners & More

Ally Financial (NYSE: ALLY), Cerulean Pharma (NASDAQ: CERU), and Adamas Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ: ADMS) opened for trading Thursday amid a stock market in free-fall.

Ally Financial, formerly known as GMAC, began trading 95M shares as the US Treasury divests itself of 177M shares.

The stock opened for trading shortly after 9:30 a.m. at $24.25 per share after pricing on the low end of its range at $25.00 per share. Ally moved briskly higher in early trading in an attempt to break above its IPO price. Met with resistance from sellers and the early stages of the market sell-off, Ally faltered near 10:00 a.m. before slowly drifting to the lows of the day.

Ally closed its first day of trading at $23.98, a 1.1 percent decline from its open, down four percent from its $25.00 IPO price.

Cerulean Pharmaceutical, specializes in clinical-stage nanopharmaceuticals. The drugs are designed and optimized for therapeutic agents, ranging from peptides to RNAi molecules.

Cerulean raised almost $60M from the 8.5M share offering. The stock priced at $7 per share and opened at $7.10. Like Ally, Cerulean moved higher in early trading but was caught up in the market's troubles. Shortly after opening, it tapped a high of $7.66 and quickly crumbled to close near its low at $6.83.

Adamas Pharmaceutical, specializes in developing and commercializing therapeutics targeting chronic disorders of the central nervous system. Its success is derived from enhancing the pharmacokinetic profiles of developed and tested drugs to create unique therapeutics for standalone use or as a combination.

Priced at $16.00 per share, the company's 3M IPO opened for trading at $16.85 Thursday morning. The market was unkind to stock's first day of trading and shares tumbled $3 from its high of $17.24 to close at $14. IPO investors quickly found themselves in the red and ended the day with a double digit loss of 12.5 percent.

Tomorrow will wrap up this week for IPO's, and it's shaping up to be an active Friday for new issues.

IPOs for April 11, 2014

• City Office REIT (NYSE: CIO): 6.7M shares are being offered through Janney Montgomery Scott
• Alderya Therapeutics (NASDAQ: ALDX): Aegis Capital will lead the 2.3M share offering. Pricing is expected between $10 and $12.
• Paycom Software (NYSE: PAYC): 6.6M shares are being offered between $18 and $20 through Barclays Capital.
• Scynexis (NASDAQ: SCYX): 7.3M shares are expected to price between $7 and $8 through RBC Capital and Canaccord Genuity.
• Enable Midstream Partners (NYSE: ENBL): 25M shares are expected to price between $19 and $21 through lead underwriter Barclays Capital.
• Farmland Partners (NYSE: FPI): Farmland was supposed to open Thursday, but is now slated for Friday. Look for 4.7M shares between $14 and $16.
• Phibro Animal Health Corp (NASDAQ: PAHC): 11.8M shares are pricing through Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. Expected price range is $16 to $18.
• Zoe's Kitchen (NYSE: ZOES): 5.8M shares are expected to price between $11 and $13 through Jefferies, Piper Jaffray and Baird.

Friday's most interesting IPO to watch will be Paycom Software. The company provides cloud-based software for human capital management. The company provides analytics that businesses can use to more efficiently manage the employment of its employees, starting with recruitment and ending in retirement.

The cloud is still a hot keyword in today's world. Combining technology services with a cloud-based platform that can be rolled out in a scalable manner should prove to give some insight into current investor demand for freshly minted technology IPO's, making Paycom tomorrow's IPO to watch.

Disclosure: At the time of this writing, the author holds no positions in any aforementioned securities; however, at a future time, he may choose to hold long or short positions without notice.