Shelf Offering

Categories: IPO

You like homemade pickled eggs. However, they're a pain to make. So you don't just make one or two when you want to eat them. You make a whole bunch. Then you put the extra on the shelf. They're there when you get a craving.

Same thing with a shelf offering. A company registers shares with regulators, but doesn't sell them all at once. Instead, it puts some of the shares on the shelf (metaphorically speaking). It can now sell them in the future, without having to file all the paperwork again. The firm has a three-year window to sell the stock without having to go through the bureaucratic rigmarole, which can often smell even worse than pickled eggs.

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Finance: What is shelf registration?3 Views

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Finance a la shmoop what is shelf registration?

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well there are mussels and oysters and clams...Oh wait, that would be shellfish [Seafood dishes appear]

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registration but it's making me hungry and yeah the real definition of shelf

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registration needs a little horseradish or something just to like you know wake [Woman sniffs horseradish while in bed]

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you up specifically a shelf registration is a kind of public offering where banks

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and other fiduciary fancy institutions can offer new securities in companies

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without going through the myriad dance steps needed for a full-contact naked

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IPO and usually a shelf registration applies in the situation where a company [Man discussing shelf registration in a club]

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in a similar business might be offering the same product but in different

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geographies like a company drilling oil pipelines in the southeast might file to [Oil pipeline appears]

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raise money just from investors in that area while doing a similar offering in

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the northwest in middle America and maybe even out of the country in this

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situation the business dynamics are almost identical in each area because

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like oil is oil right with the one exception of specific regional laws that [Wolves appear from woods]

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may differ like you gotta be really careful about polluting the Everglades

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in Florida and well, lakes in general and some

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people care a lot about that and some people don't like people in the

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northwest are a whole lot more sensitive to polluting arsenic on their moose then

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are the kindly loving citizens of kamchatka in I think that's in eastern [Man appears with moose in Russia]

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Russia in making this kind of shelf offering the filings are essentially in

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piles on a shelf with a few pages changed for each flavor of filing you

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know simplifies things a lot they are then sent out to the relevant investors

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who then do their own assessments as to whether or not they want to buy in well [Woman investor looking at folder]

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the investment system can come in the form of warrants, convertible bonds,

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series of equities in various shapes and forms but companies appreciate the

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ability to file shelf registrations because of the dramatic reduction in

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paper cost lawyer fees and well, filing experiences where the auditors first

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comment is you know turn your head and cough...stop polluting and you won't [Doctor asks patient to turn head and cough]

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cough so much

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