Finance History|11 Wall Street — Twenty-Three Dollars for a Record Oil Book

People treat ConocoPhillips as a Houston explorer that always printed COP on a combined book.

The 1998 issuer was still Conoco Inc., a DuPont subsidiary being sold in pieces.

The New York Times of 22 October 1998 recorded that a syndicate led by Morgan Stanley Dean Witter priced 191.456 million Class A shares the previous day at 23 dollars each in 1998 currency, above a planned 150 million and inside a 20-to-24-dollar range.

The Washington Post the same morning put the cash raised at about 4.4 billion dollars for the parent. That print was then the largest initial public offering completed in the United States.

The Journal Record recorded the first New York Stock Exchange print at 24 and 7/8 dollars, an 8 percent premium to the offer, under the ticker COC.

DuPont kept more than 70 percent and planned a later tax-free distribution of the rest.

On 30 August 2002 Conoco and Phillips Petroleum merged into a new Delaware parent. Each Phillips common share became one ConocoPhillips share. Each Conoco share became 0.4677 of a share.

The new common was approved for the New York Stock Exchange as COP and began trading on 3 September 2002.

The mechanism is a parent cashing a minority of an oil subsidiary at a record size, then folding that listed line into a merger-of-equals ticker four years later.

Holders in 1998 bought an integrated oil book still majority-owned by a chemical company. Holders after 2002 bought the combined upstream and refining parent.

The pin is the Broad Street facade of the Exchange, where COC printed and COP replaced it. 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.