pipeline

Pipeline

1) An investment company whose purpose is to collect investment funds from a pool of individual investors and invest them in financial securities.

2) The underwriting procedure which must be completed by the Securities &amp Exchange Commission (SEC) before a security can be offered for sale to the public.

3) A type of risk most often present in mortgage transactions. It expresses the potential for change in financial factors during the time lapse between the mortgage application and the purchase of the property.

Investopedia Commentary

1) Such firms are usually exempt from normal corporate taxes, since they simply serve as an investment conduit, or pipeline, rather than actually producing goods and services as a regular corporation does. A mutual fund structured as a trust would be exempt from corporate taxes and considered an investment pipeline.

2) A new security issue must go through the SEC's pipeline before it is legally cleared for sale to the public. This practice attempts to screen out fraudulent investments and ensures security offerings are presented to the public in an accurate fashion.

3) During the time it takes for a bank to review a mortgage application and for a borrower to actually purchase their desired property (the mortgage pipeline), financial conditions specific to the application can change, which would change the amount of risk the bank incurs by lending funds to the borrower.

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See also: Corporate Tax, Default Risk, Investment Company, Investment Income, Mortgage, Pipeline Theory, Public Offering, Securities & Exchange Commission - SEC

Also spelled: pipelines, investment pipeline, conduits, sec pipeline

pipeline

The process through which security issues pass before their distribution to the public. If securities are being readied for distribution, they are said to be in the pipeline.

pipeline architecture
A sequence of functional units ("stages") which performs a task in several steps, like an assembly line in a factory. Each functional unit takes inputs and produces outputs which are stored in its output buffer. One stage's output buffer is the next stage's input buffer. This arrangement allows all the stages to work in parallel thus giving greater throughput than if each input had to pass through the whole pipeline before the next input could enter.
The costs are greater latency and complexity due to the need to synchronise the stages in some way so that different inputs do not interfere. The pipeline will only work at full efficiency if it can be filled and emptied at the same rate that it can process.
Pipelines may be synchronous or asynchronous. A synchronous pipeline has a master clock and each stage must complete its work within one cycle. The minimum clock period is thus determined by the slowest stage. An asynchronous pipeline requires handshaking between stages so that a new output is not written to the interstage buffer before the previous one has been used.
Many CPUs are arranged as one or more pipelines, with different stages performing tasks such as fetch instruction, decode instruction, fetch arguments, arithmetic operations, store results. For maximum performance, these rely on a continuous stream of instructions fetched from sequential locations in memory. Pipelining is often combined with instruction prefetch in an attempt to keep the pipeline busy.
When a branch is taken, the contents of early stages will contain instructions from locations after the branch which should not be executed. The pipeline then has to be flushed and reloaded. This is known as a pipeline break.
(1996-10-13)