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China's Alibaba Group said it bought back half the stake Yahoo Inc owned in the company for about $7.6 billion, moving closer to an initial public offering.

Tech investors are sidling up to the bar again after the "Facebook hangover," only this time they are minding their P's and Q's. "In a sense, the tech IPOs are back," said Francis Gaskins, president of IPODesktop.com. Only seven tech or Internet companies have gone public since Facebook's IPO; by comparison, Gaskins said now there are 20 technology companies in the IPO pipeline. The difference is that the offerings are smaller and priced to lure institutional investors rather than emotion-driven retail investors.

Supermarket chain Safeway SWY +4.30% is planning to spinoff its gift-card subsidiary Blackhawk Network with an IPO next year, only months after saying that wasn’t in the cards. The plan, revealed in a short press release with scant details, calls for a minority stake to be sold in Blackhawk.

The stock market operates in mysterious ways. Yelp shares are actually trading sharply higher this morning, despite the expiration of the company's post-IPO lock-up period. As I noted earlier, the stock had lost about a third of its value in anticipation of today's event; for reasons that are not entirely clear, the stock has responded to the news with a major rally.

UBS decried a proposal from Nasdaq to make up losses for firms damaged in the Facebook stock-market debut, joining a growing chorus of Wall Street players that are calling on regulators to reject the exchange operator's plan.

Facebook's beleaguered stock has lost more than half of its value since its initial public offering three months ago. Facebook Inc. hit a new low of $18.75 before bouncing back to $19.01 - down 4 cents - in morning trading Monday. The social networking icon's much-anticipated IPO turned sour amid technical problems on the NASDAQ stock market and high expectations. The stock has not surpassed its $38 IPO price since its first trading day.

Trulia, the operator of the Trulia.com real estate website, filed for a public stock offering Friday that could bring the company up to $75 million.

Facebook’s stock price reached a new low Thursday as shares of the world's largest social network fell below $20 for the first time, down by nearly half from its $38 initial public offering price.

Soccer powerhouse Manchester United is expected to launch its IPO in New York as early as next week, for pricing in early August, after earlier attempts in Hong Kong, Singapore and the UK.

Manchester United filed for an initial public offering in the United States on Tuesday, a move that would return the English soccer team to the public markets. The club set a preliminary fund-raising target of $100 million to determine registration fees. It had previously hoped to raise about $1 billion in either Hong Kong or Singapore. Manchester United had traded on the London Stock Exchange before Malcolm Glazer, an American who also controls the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team, took the company private in a $1.45 billion buyout in 2005.