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Direct registration

Holding shares registered in your own name on the company's books at the transfer agent, without a paper certificate and without a broker as intermediary.

DRS puts you on the register directly. The shares cannot be lent, they are not part of any broker's inventory, and communications come from the transfer-agent rather than passed through. In exchange, trading is slower: you generally move the shares back into a brokerage account before selling, which takes days.

DRS is not a certificate. It is the same book-entry ownership, just recorded at the agent instead of at the broker, and it does not remove market risk, only intermediary risk.

Example: a holder moves 500 shares out of street-name. The broker's position falls by 500, the transfer agent's register rises by 500, and the dtcc position held for that broker falls correspondingly.

Related: street-name, transfer-agent, cede-and-co, dtcc, securities-lending

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