Still, Wall Street predicts that the market for initial offerings will improve over the rest of the year. In large part that is because investors ranging from big mutual funds to hedge funds still have plenty of money ready to spend on promising offerings.

Take shares in Aduro Biotech, a small drug company that priced its I.P.O. at $17 a share on Tuesday. As of Wednesday’s market close, that stock has already more than doubled to $42 on its first day of trading.

The three big companies that priced their offerings on Wednesday are considerably larger and more prominent. Investors valued Etsy at $1.8 billion, Party City at just under $2 billion and Virtu at $2.6 billion.

At those levels, the three will have attained some of the biggest I.P.O. valuations this year, exceeded only by the likes of GoDaddy and Inovalon, a health care data analysis company.

All three of the companies making debuts priced their offerings at the top end of the price ranges predicted earlier: Etsy at $16, Virtu at $19, and Party City at $17.

Perhaps the most closely watched of the three is Etsy, whose sometimes quirky corporate culture has extended even to its decision to reserve part of its I.P.O. for sellers on its platform. The company has shown strong business performance by a number of measures, with sales rising 56 percent last year, to $195.6 million.

Virtu, meanwhile, is trying to go public for a second time in two years. It postponed the stock sale last spring in the face of a furor about high-frequency trading prompted by the publication of the Michael Lewis book “Flash Boys.”