Finance History | 11 Wall Street — Nine Dollars Under the Range, and SQ Took the Tape

People treat Block as a San Francisco payments group that always printed XYZ.

The 2015 issuer was Square, Inc., still a privately held card-reader shop.

On 18 November 2015 Square priced 27 million Class A shares at 9 dollars each in 2015 currency, below the 11-to-13 dollar range it had filed.

The company offered 25.65 million shares and the Start Small Foundation, a donor-advised fund created by the founder, offered 1.35 million.

The sale raised 243 million dollars.

Trading began 19 November 2015 on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol SQ.

Shares opened at 11.20 dollars and closed at 13.07, a 45 percent first-day gain from the offer price.

Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, and J.P. Morgan led the books.

The parent later changed its legal name to Block, Inc., in December 2021 and moved the ticker from SQ to XYZ on 22 January 2025.

The mechanism is a dual-class payments company taking a haircut off its last private valuation so the first print can clear, then renaming the parent so the seller brand and the holding company no longer share a word.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange. Interior trading is not visitable from the sidewalk.

Photo: Arild Vagen, August 2017, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. New York Stock Exchange from Broad Street.