Initial Public Offerings

After a decade, adult-film star Alexis Amore is looking to remove the Playboy bunny tattoo below her belly button. She also wants to get rid of a crown and the letter "a" on her wrists. "I got them when I was really young," said the petite 30-year-old. "I'm a little bit older and a little bit wiser now. And it's not very classy to have tattoos on your wrists and stomach." Amore, who goes by her stage name, is in the months-long process of getting rid of her ink at the Dr.

Credit card goliath Visa Inc. said Monday that it planned to raise as much as $18.8 billion in what would be the largest initial public offering in U.S. history. The timing surprised analysts because the credit crunch and a possible recession could slow consumer spending and eat into the company's profit.

Amid the tightening credit market, theater operator AMC Entertainment Holdings Inc. has pulled the plug on its planned initial public offering. The Kansas City, Mo.-based company, whose lead investors include JP Morgan Partners and Apollo Management, said Friday in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission that it was withdrawing its $500-million stock offering.

Meruelo Maddux Properties Inc., the largest landlord in downtown Los Angeles, raised $400 million Wednesday in an initial public stock offering intended to capitalize on investors' widespread demand for commercial real estate. Meruelo Maddux sold 40 million shares at $10 each, well below the $12 to $14 a share the L.A.-based company was seeking. The stock will begin trading today on Nasdaq under the symbol MMPI.

The American Stock Exchange, the third-largest U.S. equity market, has hired Morgan Stanley to help it become a for-profit shareholder-owned company, the first step toward a possible public stock offering. Morgan Stanley will also study "potential strategic future initiatives" for the market, the exchange said in a statement Thursday. Members of the 164-year-old marketplace would still have to approve any plan to convert their memberships or seats into shares.

Cinemark Holdings Inc., which owns 392 cinemas in the U.S. and Latin America, filed to sell shares in an initial public offering valued at about $400 million and use the proceeds to pay back debt. The Plano, Texas, company plans to apply to list its shares on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CNK. The company was created in October when Cinemark Inc. bought Century Theatres Inc. of San Rafael, Calif., for about $681 million and assumed about $360 million in debt.

The secretive world of hedge funds and corporate buyout specialists took a big step into the mainstream Thursday: For the first time, a U.S.-based manager of such funds became a publicly traded company. Hedge funds and buyout firms cater to wealthy, sophisticated investors who are looking for big profits and are unafraid to take sizable risks.

Shares of Fortress Investment Group, the first U.S. hedge fund manager to go public, soared Friday in a trading debut sure to catch the attention of many players in the $1.4-trillion hedge fund industry. The stock's initial public offering was priced late Thursday at $18.50 a share and rocketed to $37 at the start of trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The shares, under the symbol FIG, then pulled back but still closed up $12.50, or 68%, at $31.

When Goldman Sachs Group Inc. went public in May 1999, some on Wall Street figured it was a signal to bail out of brokerage stocks. If Goldman was letting the public into its business after 130 years as a highly profitable -- and secretive -- private partnership, the insiders must have known that was as good as it would get. Hardly. Goldman earned an astounding $9.5 billion last year, a 252% increase from its profit of $2.7 billion in 1999.

The secretive world of private equity investing could soon become a lot more public. Blackstone Group, one of the world's leading private equity firms, reportedly is planning to sell shares in an initial public stock offering. Such a deal would be a milestone in the evolution of private equity funds, which buy and restructure companies in hopes of selling them at much higher prices a few years later.