Chimerix, the Durham antiviral drug developer, closed at $18.17 per share to cap its first week as a publicly traded company.

Chimerix shares slipped 3.3 percent in Friday trading after a 34-percent surge Thursday, the day the stock went public. The strong response from investors helped Chimerix raise more than $102 million by offering the stock at $14 a share.

The 13-year-old company doesn’t have a prescription drug on the market, but investors have confidence in its experimental treatments for life-threatening viral infections in patients whose immune systems have been compromised by cancer or by drugs.

Chimerix was one of two Triangle companies that made IPO news Thursday. Morrisville-based ChannelAdvisor told the Securities and Exchange Commission it expects to raise as much as $86 million through a public offering.

Chimerix expects to net about $95 million from the stock sale after paying banking fees and commissions. The 46-employee company will use the money for research and development, debt payments and general operations.

The CEO of Wells Fargo, John Stumpf, will be in Raleigh Nov. 30 to discuss the future of the financial services industry.

Stumpf's talk is part of a lecture series put on by N.C. State's Poole College of Management. His lecture is titled "The State of the Financial Services Industry."

The event is being held in the Nelson Hall Auditorium, 2800 Founders Drive, at the corner of Hillsborough Street and Dan Allen Drive, from 4:15 p.m. to 5:15 p.m.

The lecture is free and no reservations are required to attend.

William D. Cohan, a Duke alum who in recent years has made a very successful transition from investment banker to author, has been penning some opinion columns in the New York Times of late.

Cohan published a piece Thursday in the Times about an issue that he raised when we chatted with him back in October: The lack of accountability and transparency from the people who were at the center of the Wall Street meltdown.

"To date, these elusive but important Wall Street executives have kept an exceedingly low profile, hoping against hope that the whole thing just blows over," Cohan writes. "We can’t let that happen. There is just too much at stake now, and Wall Street has proved repeatedly over the past 40 years — since the firms went from private partnerships (where partners had their entire net worth on the line) to public companies (where bankers and traders were encouraged to take huge risks with other people’s money) — that it is incapable of regulating itself."

Cohan, whose previous book documented the downfall of Bear Stearns, is now working on a book about Goldman Sachs. He's also become a regular contributor to Vanity Fair magazine.

In the Times piece, he dismisses the work of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission as mere political theater.

He also takes a swipe at some of the reform ideas recently pushed by Paul Volker, the former Fed Chairman.

The financial turmoil that keeps claiming victims on Wall Street has created an opening for Raleigh-based Red Hat.

The software maker will replace floundering CIT Group in the iconic Standard & Poor’s 500 Index next week. In addition to the cachet the move gives Red Hat, Companies added to the S&P 500 typically rally as investors who track the index buy shares.

The financial situation in the country has readers riled up, with plenty of blame to go around. These letters appear online only.