Conventional shipping initial public offerings will return to New York in 2018 after a drought of almost three years — and the first will likely be in dry bulk.

This is the majority view of a group of experts polled by TradeWinds as the finance community returns from the holidays and begins to assess the capital-markets landscape again.

That said, conviction does not appear to be overly strong and some feel there will be more cases of private owners merging into public listings or perhaps further public-on-public combinations such as Euronav’s pending takeover of Gener8 Maritime in crude tankers.