Finance History | 11 Wall Street — Forty-Seven Fifty and a Ten-Share Round Lot

People treat Berkshire Hathaway as an Omaha holding company that was born on the Big Board.

The Class A line spent decades over the counter.

On 29 November 1988 Berkshire listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Buffett's 1988 letter to shareholders records the date and says the primary goal was to cut transaction costs.

The Associated Press, printed the next day in the Los Angeles Times, recorded an opening print of 4,750 dollars a share in 1988 currency and a close of 4,700 dollars, unchanged from the Monday over-the-counter close. An Exchange spokeswoman put the float at 1,375,203 common shares.

The specialist was Henderson Brothers. The round lot was ten shares, not the usual hundred.

Any number from one share up could still be traded.

Buffett told holders the bid-asked spread on the Exchange had already run below the over-the-counter spread. The firm did not list to maximize the quoted price.

Class B shares, later called Baby Bs, arrived only in 1996. They are a separate memory.

The mechanism is a high-priced OTC name moving to an agency auction to shrink the dealer spread, not to raise cash. No primary offering accompanied the 1988 tape change.

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

Operating offices were then in Omaha.

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