With the IPO market in Asia just as lackluster as it’s been in the U.S. this year, investors were as pleased as punch that any company as healthy and growth-oriented as Little Sheep was going public. It was a small IPO, but it was enough to get the fellas in Hong Kong excited.

Little Sheep Hot Pot finally has a ticker symbol (0968). And shares are sliding back to buyable levels.

I recommended Little Sheep last week, when the company IPOed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. But its shares were oversubscribed 71 times, meaning investors requested 71 times as many shares as the company was offering.

And us schlubs in the cheap seats over here in the U.S. had little to no chance of actually getting our hands on shares in the first week after the company’s initial offer. Heck, even traders on the floor in Hong Kong would have trouble buying shares with that many requests in. So I advised our readers to wait until the waters settled around the stock and we could get in at a decent price.

Little Sheep is the largest and most profitable hot pot (a staple of Mongolian cooking that, according to legend, was invented for Genghis Khan) restaurant in China. The company is currently moving into the U.S. and Japanese markets. In less than a decade, Little Sheep managed to open 330 restaurants, and the company expects 37% growth in profits this year.

With the IPO market in Asia just as lackluster as it’s been in the U.S. this year (no, the Visa IPO in March doesn’t make up for a season of non-events in the American IPO market, and the Chinese markets have been just as dim in 2008), investors were as pleased as punch that any company as healthy and growth-oriented as Little Sheep was going public. It was a small IPO, but it was enough to get the fellas in Hong Kong excited.

Now the initial frenzy is over. And shares are moving back down from their high open of HK$3.40 to levels closer to the company’s original pricing at HK$2.88. In U.S. dollars that’s a difference of about seven cents. Big deal, right? Not if you want to maximize returns. And I don’t advise you buy into Little Sheep until the stock falls below its offer price.

If you’d like to follow Little Sheep’s movement for yourself, I found information for the company on Google Finance and the Reuters stock tracker. Yahoo Finance doesn’t seem to know the stock exists yet… maybe Yahoo is too busy trying to prevent Carl Icahn’s threatened takeover of the company to bother with updating its foreign stocks.

If you don’t want to check Google Finance in the middle of the night for a company trading half a world away, I’ll keep an eye on the share price and let you know when the stock is at a good entry point.

Source: Buy Little Sheep (0968) Below HK$2.88