A lot of people are going to be looking for information on this.
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), based primarily at 55 Water Street in New York City, is the world’s largest post-trade financial services company. It was set up to provide an efficient and safe way for buyers and sellers of securities to make their exchange, and thus “clear and settle” transactions. It also provides custody of securities.
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In 2007, DTCC settled the vast majority of securities transactions in the United States, more than $1.86 quadrillion in value. DTCC has operating facilities in New York City, and at multiple locations in and outside the U.S.
About 99% of the time, trades are completed without incident. But about 1% of the shares — valued at about $2.5 billion on a given a day — aren’t delivered to the buyer within the requisite three days, for one reason or another.
These “failures to deliver” have put DTCC in the middle of a long-running fight over whether unscrupulous investors are driving down hundreds of small companies’ share prices.
At issue is a nefarious twist on short-selling, a legitimate practice that involves trying to profit on a stock’s falling price by selling borrowed shares in hopes of later replacing them with cheaper ones. The twist is known as “naked shorting” — selling shares without borrowing them.
In brief, they process the vast majority of all stock transactions in the United States as well as for many other countries. And – and that’s the real interesting part – 99% of all stocks in the U.S. appear to be legally owned by them.
In the old days, when you owned stocks you would have the stock certificates lying in your safe. And if you needed to trade them, you needed to get them shipped off to a broker. Nowadays that would be considered very cumbersome, and it would be impractical to invest via computer or over the phone. So the shortcut was invented that the broker would hold your stocks instead of you. And in order for him to legally be able to trade them for you, the stocks were placed under their “street name”. I.e. they’re in the name of the brokerage, but they’re just holding them in trust and trading them for you. And you’re in reality the beneficiary rather than the owner. Which is all fine and dandy if everything goes right. Now, it appears the rules were then changed so the brokers are not allowed any longer to put the stocks in their own name. Instead, what they typically do is to put the stocks into the name of “Cede and Company” or “Cede & Co” or some such variation. And the broker might tell you that it is just a fictitious name, and will explain why it is really more practical to do that than to put it in your name.
The problem with that is that it appears that Cede isn’t just some dummy name, but an actual corporation that DTCC controls.
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Great blog man Thank you