Finance History|11 Wall Street — Sixteen Fifty Four Weeks Before the Crash

People treat Charles Schwab as a Westlake brokerage that always printed SCHW.

The 1987 issuer printed SCH.

The company's own stock-split page records that The Charles Schwab Corporation completed its initial public offering on 22 September 1987.

The New York Times that morning recorded the price at 16.50 dollars a share, an eight-million-share sale worth about 132 million dollars in 1987 currency, led by Morgan Stanley.

More than half the proceeds were to retire debt from the 280 million dollar buyback of the firm from BankAmerica earlier that year.

After the sale the Times put the market value at about 419 million dollars, with the chairman holding more than a quarter of 25.4 million outstanding shares.

A later excerpt of the founder's memoir recorded a first close of 16.625 dollars.

1986 revenue was given by the Times as 308.3 million dollars in 1986 currency.

Black Monday arrived on 19 October 1987, twenty-seven calendar days later.

The mechanism is a leveraged repurchase paid down by a public minority. Holders bought a discount broker that management had just taken back from a bank holding company.

The later SCHW ticker is a rename of this SCH line, not a second issue.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange, where SCH first printed. 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.