In another time the $5.07 billion price tag for NSW ports sold last Friday might have been the sort of deal to get a roll on for the market's deal junkies.
After all, it's not often the market estimates for the price -- $2.5bn to $3bn -- is so far (60 per cent) below the final estimate, or that you have the successful bidder backing up with calls for more of the same, please.
But, for a variety of reasons, bankers around town don't see Friday's result as a green light for a whole host of mooted deals.
That is likely to make the top three dealmakers so far this year -- UBS and Lazard, which acted on behalf of the Industry Funds Management consortium, and Morgan Stanley, which advised the NSW government -- difficult to overtake on the league table, even if it is early in the year.
It should give state governments around the country confidence in prioritising privatisation as they look to repair their finances, knowing that they will attract strong bidding interest.
While the deal showed there are some very keen and well-resourced bidders in Australian and Canadian pension funds and sovereign wealth funds that lined up for the sale of Port Botany and Port Kembla, for the time being there's a distinct lack of opportunity for the deals they are after.
The electricity generators that are next on the block for the NSW government are capital intensive and volatile in their earnings profile, and their sale is complicated by the sale of the gentrader contracts in 2010.
They don't have the the sort of long-life, low-volatility earnings that the successful port bidders -- led by Industry Funds Management and including a who's who of the industry funds as well as the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority -- have been openly touting for.
Neither the NSW government nor its Queensland counterpart has the mandate to sell the sort of assets, such as the state electricity transmission systems, that would interest those funds, making them second-term options at the earliest.
In equity capital markets investors remain focused on yield -- they happily supported the Aurizon sell-down and rushed the Envestra capital raising -- but may have their appetite for new equity tested this year.
There are still a handful of big-ticket businesses to come to the market from private equity and other vendors, among them the Coates business jointly owned by Kerry Stokes's Seven Group and private-equity firm Carlyle, and the BIS business owned by KKR.
But both have exposure to the resources sector where project developments are being stalled or scaled down.
And as shown yesterday by the big sell-off in resource stocks and contractors following a weaker-than-expected Chinese gross domestic product growth figure for the March quarter, investors remain nervous about the resources outlook.
Fertility treatment group Virtus Health is another, like BIS, in the early stages of marketing to investors.
At $500 million it's smaller than the ports deal and is heading for the equity markets rather than trade buyers. How it fares should be a good indication of investors' deal appetite.
