Biography|Hock Tan — Fifteen Dollars a Share Under the Nasdaq Screen

People treat AVGO as a ticker that always belonged to a mature Broadcom book.

The first print was an analog-chip company still named Avago, priced the night of 5 August 2009 and opened on 6 August.

Tan had been chief executive for a little more than three years. The firm was still dual-headed in Singapore and San Jose.

The listing was on the Nasdaq Global Select Market.

The offering sold 43.2 million ordinary shares at 15 dollars, the top of the marketed range. Company and selling shareholders together raised 648 million dollars.

It was the second-largest U.S. IPO of 2009.

Trading opened around 16.51 dollars, a jump of about ten percent on the issue price, then settled in the mid-sixteens that morning.

Joint bookrunners were Deutsche Bank, Barclays, Morgan Stanley, and Citi. The symbol chosen was AVGO, not a Broadcom code.

Broadcom Corporation still traded separately as BRCM in Irvine.

Nasdaq MarketSite at 4 Times Square is the public studio the exchange uses for listings and interviews. The matching engine itself does not live in the window.

The screen is the place a visitor can still stand.

Six and a half years later Avago would buy Broadcom, keep this ticker, and take the better-known name. The August tape did not know that yet.

What happened here was a private-equity chip shop testing the public market at 15 dollars and finding buyers.

Photo: Luca Marfè, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. A 2015 MarketSite studio frame at the same Times Square address.