ECM's IPO

"Past performance is no indication of future performance" is the disclaimer finance companies use when touting their brilliance in reading the markets. After studying Jana Mlčochová's warnings in Czech Business Weekly about ECM's initial public offering, investors might hope that ECM's past is indeed no indication of its future. Mlčochová's argument in her two columns on ECM is that investors should beware of it, because it engaged in the past in sleazy - if not illegal - business practices in the CR and Russia. Investors have ignored the warning, though, and have turned ECM into a successful IPO. This is an important precedent for the CR. Unlike most past stock listings, many of the businesses going public in the next few years will be Khodorkovsky-like carpe diem stories. By buying their shares, investors will implicitly be approving of the methods used in the lawless 90s.