Finance History | 11 Wall Street — Thirty-One Dollars and a Limited Partner Unit

People treat Blackstone as a public alternative-asset manager that always printed ordinary shares.

The 2007 issuer was a limited partnership selling common units.

On 21 June 2007 The Blackstone Group L.P. priced 133,333,334 common units at 31 dollars each in 2007 currency.

The firm's own press release put the proceeds at 4.133 billion dollars.

Trading began the next morning, 22 June 2007, on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol BX.

The New York Times recorded the first print at 36.55 dollars and a close at 35.06.

The sale represented a 12.3 percent stake.

In the same transaction Blackstone sold 3 billion dollars of non-voting common units to an investment vehicle set up by the People's Republic of China for its foreign-exchange reserve.

Morgan Stanley and Citi were the global coordinators.

The mechanism is a buyout firm converting a partnership into listed units the public can own while the founders keep the rest, and pairing the float with a state buyer of non-voting paper.

The 2007 tape printed at 11 Wall Street.

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.