We've officially hit July. By now, most of us have forgotten our New Year's resolutions to exercise more, and instead we spend our time inside of our air conditioned homes eating basically whatever we want to. Well, at least that what's what I have been doing.

However, I'm here today to introduce a new concept: the second half of the year resolution. It's a simple concept. We take this time to reinvigorate ourselves and have a great second half of 2016.

I was inspired to think of this idea after taking a look at the performance of IPOs in the first half of the year. So far we've seen just over 40 IPOs priced in the United States, and although total global IPO activity in 2Q16 nearly doubled that of 1Q16, it was still down 56% year-over-year.

I'm going to cut the IPO market some slack here. Just like I told myself I was going to go outside and run more this year, I'm sure the global markets would have really hoped for solid IPO activity in 2016. But things happen. It gets hot outside, I get lazy, and sometimes there's global economic and political uncertainty for the better part of six months.

To start the year, the sluggish Chinese economy put a drain on trading throughout the world, and it was quickly followed by confusion about the timetable for U.S. interest rate hikes. Tack on the chaos that was the Brexit, and it makes sense that the IPO market would be slumping this year.

Now that we're at this point, we'll look back at exactly what has happened in the IPO market this year, and more importantly, we'll see what lies ahead for the rest of 2016.

First Half Trends

Renaissance Capital, a manager of IPO-tracking ETFS, recently published a report that detailed trends and recapped global IPO activity so far this year. This report, along with other market data, paints an interesting picture of IPOs in 2016.

As per usual, the highest returns on IPOs this year have been from the highly-manipulated Chinese A-share market where the government intentionally undervalues companies in order to post higher returns.