Cede and Company (also known as Cede and Co. or Cede & Co.) is a specialist United States financial institution that processes transfers of stock certificates on behalf of Depository Trust Company, the central securities depository used by the United States National Market System, which includes the New York Stock Exchange, and Nasdaq. [1] Cede and Company is a shorthand for the phrase 'certificate depository.' [2] Appropriately, the word 'cede' means to 'give up (power or territory)' [3] because investors give up their stock and companies give up their shareholders to an intermediary. [4]
Cede technically owns most of the publicly issued stock in the United States. [5] Thus, most investors do not themselves hold direct property rights in stock, but rather have contractual rights that are part of a chain of contractual rights involving Cede. [6] Securities held at Depository Trust Company are registered in its nominee name, Cede & Co., and recorded on its books in the name of the brokerage firm through which they were purchased; on the brokerage firm's books they are assigned to the accounts of their beneficial owners. [7]
Cede owns 83% of all issued stocks in the United States. [8] The other 17% of all issued stocks is owned by directly registered holders through the direct registration system.[ needs update ]
Founded in 1996, Cede was formed for the purpose of efficiently processing transfers of stock certificates on behalf of the Depository Trust Company. [9] The name "Cede" was selected as a reference to "certificate depository". [10] The company is at 55 Water Street, Suite Conc4, New York, New York 10041. [11]
Cede and Company is a New York City-based partnership of certain employees of Depository Trust Company. [12] [9] Cede is a separate legal person from Depository Trust Company, which is owned by DTC Participants, who are banks and brokerage houses, and not employees of DTC.[ citation needed ]
One reason Cede is structured as a partnership is that each general partner can order transfers of stock registered in the name of the partnership without the need for presenting a separate corporate resolution to the stock issuer's transfer agent or stock registrar to validate the authority of the transfer.[ citation needed ]
A security is a tradable financial asset. The term commonly refers to any form of financial instrument, but its legal definition varies by jurisdiction. In some countries and languages people commonly use the term "security" to refer to any form of financial instrument, even though the underlying legal and regulatory regime may not have such a broad definition. In some jurisdictions the term specifically excludes financial instruments other than equity and fixed income instruments. In some jurisdictions it includes some instruments that are close to equities and fixed income, e.g., equity warrants.
An American depositary receipt is a negotiable security that represents securities of a foreign company and allows that company's shares to trade in the U.S. financial markets.
In financial markets, a share is a unit of equity ownership in the capital stock of a corporation. It can refer to units of mutual funds, limited partnerships, and real estate investment trusts. Share capital refers to all of the shares of an enterprise. The owner of shares in a company is a shareholder of the corporation. A share expresses the ownership relationship between the company and the shareholder. The denominated value of a share is its face value, and the total of the face value of issued shares represent the capital of a company, which may not reflect the market value of those shares.
The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC) is an American financial market infrastructure company that provides clearing, settlement and trade reporting services to financial market participants. It performs the exchange of securities on behalf of buyers and sellers and functions as a central securities depository by providing central custody of securities.
CREST is a UK-based central securities depository that holds UK equities and UK gilts, as well as Irish equities and other international securities.
Security market is a component of the wider financial market where securities can be bought and sold between subjects of the economy, on the basis of demand and supply. Security markets encompasses stock markets, bond markets and derivatives markets where prices can be determined and participants both professional and non professional can meet.
The phrase street name securities or "nominee name securities" is used in the United States to refer to securities of companies which are held electronically in the account of a stockbroker or bank or custodian, similar to a bank account. The entity whose name is recorded as the legal owner of the securities is known as the "nominee owner," and that entity has ownership rights in the security. The nominee owner holds those ownership rights on behalf of the true economic owner who is referred to as the beneficial owner.
Settlement is the "final step in the transfer of ownership involving the physical exchange of securities or payment". After settlement, the obligations of all the parties have been discharged and the transaction is considered complete.
Euroclear is a Belgium-based financial services company that specialises in the clearing and settlement of securities transactions, as well as the safekeeping and asset servicing of these securities. It was founded in 1968 as part of J.P. Morgan & Co. to settle trades on the then developing eurobond market. It is one of two European international central securities depositories.
Naked short selling, or naked shorting, is the practice of short-selling a tradable asset of any kind without first borrowing the asset from someone else or ensuring that it can be borrowed. When the seller does not obtain the asset and deliver it to the buyer within the required time frame, the result is known as a "failure to deliver" (FTD). The transaction generally remains open until the asset is acquired and delivered by the seller, or the seller's broker settles the trade on their behalf.
In corporate law, a stock certificate is a legal document that certifies the legal interest of ownership of a specific number of shares or stock in a corporation.
Depository Trust Company (DTC), founded in 1973, is a New York corporation that performs the functions of a central securities depository as part of the US National Market System. DTC annually settles transactions worth hundreds of trillions of dollars, processes hundreds of millions of book-entry deliveries, and custodies millions of securities issues worth tens of trillions of dollars issued in the United States and over 100 other countries. Since 1999 it has been a subsidiary of the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation, a securities holding company.
A stock transfer agent, transfer agent, share registry or transfer agency is an entity, usually a third-party firm unrelated to security transactions, that manages the change in ownership of company stock or investment fund shares, maintains a register of ownership and acts as paying agent for the payment of dividends and other distributions to investors. The name derives from the impartial intermediary role a transfer agent plays in validating and registering the purchase of new ownership shares and, in the case of a transfer of ownership, cancelling the name and certificate of shareholders who sell shares and substituting the new owner's name on the official master shareholder register.
The National Market System (NMS) is a regulatory mechanism that governs the operations of securities trading in the United States. Its primary focus is ensuring transparency and full disclosure regarding stock price quotations and trade executions. It was initiated in 1975, when, in the Securities Acts Amendments of 1975, Congress directed the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to use its authority to facilitate the establishment of a national market system. The system has been updated periodically, for example with the Regulation NMS in 2005 which took into account technological innovations and other market changes.
The Unidroit convention on substantive rules for intermediated securities, also known as the Geneva Securities Convention, was adopted on 9 October 2009. It has been signed by only one of the 40 negotiating States (Bangladesh), but not entered into force. The official commentary was published in 2012.
Investment Securities are securities that have been purchased as an investment. This is in contrast to securities that are purchased by a broker-dealer or other financial intermediary for resale or short term speculation.
Automated Customer Account Transfer Service (ACATS) is an almost entirely electronic system in the United States that executes the transfer of financial securities from a trading account at one institution to the trading account at another. ACATS was developed by the National Securities Clearing Corporation (NSCC), now a subsidiary of Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), a private holding company owned collectively by banks and financial institutions that handles the settlement of the vast majority of securities transactions in the United States.
In finance and financial law, dematerialization refers to the substitution of paper-form securities by book-entry securities. This is a form of indirect holding system in which an intermediary, such as a broker or central securities depository, or the issuer holds a record of the ownership of shares usually in electronic format. The dematerialization of securities such as stocks has been a major trend since the late 1960s, with the result that by 2010 the majority of global securities were held in dematerialized form electronically.
HDFC Securities Limited is a financial services intermediary and a subsidiary of HDFC Bank, a private sector bank in India. HDFC Securities was founded in year 2000 and is headquartered in Mumbai, with branches across major cities and towns in India.
Securities market participants in the United States include corporations and governments issuing securities, persons and corporations buying and selling a security, the broker-dealers and exchanges which facilitate such trading, banks which safe keep assets, and regulators who monitor the markets' activities. Investors buy and sell through broker-dealers and have their assets retained by either their executing broker-dealer, a custodian bank or a prime broker. These transactions take place in the environment of equity and equity options exchanges, regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), or derivative exchanges, regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). For transactions involving stocks and bonds, transfer agents assure that the ownership in each transaction is properly assigned to and held on behalf of each investor.
The name Cede & Co. was drawn from the term 'certificate depository'