This post is part of a featured report on stocks in the Chinese online gaming sector.

"One lesson we learned long ago is that it often pays to recognize stocks showing unusual strength -- one such stock is NetEase (NASDAQ: NTES)," says Mike Cintolo in The Cabot Market Letter.

"In terms of stocks, NetEase is showing unusual strength. The stock started moving ahead in a powerful manner as soon as (actually a bit before) the market bottomed in March.

"In fact, NTES recently notched nine straight up weeks, all on above-average volume, breaking out of a three-year base in the process!

After a long draught, the IPO market came to life this week. Changyou.com, which is a hyper-growth online gaming company based in China, was able to price its offering at $16 per share. In all, the company raised $120 million. Changyou.com is a spinoff of Sohu.com (NASDAQ: SOHU), a top portal in China.

In May 2007, Changyou launched its hugely popular game, Tian Long Ba Bu (which became the #3 game in China). The platform has about 1.8 million active paying accounts.

According to a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers, last year was horrible for IPOs. The number of deals plunged 80.7%, with the overall amount raised down 54.9%. In all, there were 57 IPOs and total proceeds came to $29.4 billion. Interesting enough, the Visa (NYSE: V) IPO accounted for $17.9 billion (it was the largest IPO in U.S. history).

Basically, the deal activity has been the slowest since the 1970s. In fact, there was only one public offering in Q1 of this year.

Unfortunately, the malaise could continue. After all, there are only a handful of filings in registration. Plus, it can easily take half a year to get an IPO through the SEC process.

It looks like Gideon Yu will need to make a major status update on his Facebook page. Yesterday, according to the Wall Street Journal (a paid publication), he left his spot as CFO of the company.

As should be no surprise, the move has caused lots of buzz (yes, Facebook has an uncanny ability to keep up the buzz machine). Basically, Facebook wants to find a CFO who has public company experience.

This is certainly interesting because Yu came on board in 2007. Didn't Facebook realize it should have thought of "public company" experience at that time? And, didn't Yu hold a high-level finance post at Yahoo! (NASDAQ: YHOO)? Oh, well. In the topsy-turvy start-up world, things don't always add up.