securities at maturity or on any coupon
payment date, and therefore you are subject to our credit risk. The
securities are not guaranteed by any other entity. If we default on
our obligations under the securities, your investment would be at
risk and you could lose some or all of your investment. As a
result, the market value of the securities prior to maturity will
be affected by changes in the market’s view of our
creditworthiness. Any actual or anticipated decline in our credit
ratings or increase in the credit spreads charged by the market for
taking our credit risk is likely to adversely affect the market
value of the securities.
■As
a finance subsidiary, MSFL has no independent operations and will
have no independent assets.
As a finance subsidiary, MSFL
has no independent operations beyond the issuance and
administration of its securities and will have no independent
assets available for distributions to holders of MSFL securities if
they make claims in respect of such securities in a bankruptcy,
resolution or similar proceeding. Accordingly, any recoveries by
such holders will be limited to those available under the related
guarantee by Morgan Stanley and that guarantee will
rank
pari passu
with all other unsecured,
unsubordinated obligations of Morgan Stanley. Holders will have
recourse only to a single claim against Morgan Stanley and its
assets under the guarantee. Holders of securities issued by MSFL
should accordingly assume that in any such proceedings they would
not have any priority over and should be treated
pari passu
with the claims of other
unsecured, unsubordinated creditors of Morgan Stanley, including
holders of Morgan Stanley-issued
securities.
■Investing
in the securities is not equivalent to investing in the common
stock of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc., the class C capital stock of
Alphabet Inc. or the common stock of Upstart Holdings,
Inc.
Investors in the securities
will not participate in any appreciation in the underlying stocks,
and will not have voting rights or rights to receive dividends or
other distributions or any other rights with respect to the
underlying stocks. As a result, any return on the securities will
not reflect the return you would realize if you actually owned
shares of the underlying stocks and received the dividends paid or
distributions made on them.
■The
securities will not be listed on any securities exchange and
secondary trading may be limited. Accordingly, you should be
willing to hold your securities for the entire 2-year term of the
securities.
The securities will not be listed on any
securities exchange. Therefore, there may be little or no secondary
market for the securities. MS & Co. may, but is not obligated
to, make a market in the securities and, if it once chooses to make
a market, may cease doing so at any time. When it does make a
market, it will generally do so for transactions of routine
secondary market size at prices based on its estimate of the
current value of the securities, taking into account its bid/offer
spread, our credit spreads, market volatility, the notional size of
the proposed sale, the cost of unwinding any related hedging
positions, the time remaining to maturity and the likelihood that
it will be able to resell the securities. Even if there is a
secondary market, it may not provide enough liquidity to allow you
to trade or sell the securities easily. Since other broker-dealers
may not participate significantly in the secondary market for the
securities, the price at which you may be able to trade your
securities is likely to depend on the price, if any, at which MS
& Co. is willing to transact. If, at any time, MS & Co.
were to cease making a market in the securities, it is likely that
there would be no secondary market for the securities. Accordingly,
you should be willing to hold your securities to
maturity.
■The
rate we are willing to pay for securities of this type, maturity
and issuance size is likely to be lower than the rate implied by
our secondary market credit spreads and advantageous to
us.
Both the lower rate and the
inclusion of costs associated with issuing, selling, structuring
and hedging the securities in the original issue price reduce the
economic terms of the securities, cause the estimated value of the
securities to be less than the original issue price and will
adversely affect secondary market prices.
Assuming no change in market conditions or any other relevant
factors, the prices, if any, at which dealers, including MS &
Co., may be willing to purchase the securities in secondary market
transactions will likely be significantly lower than the original
issue price, because secondary market prices will exclude the
issuing, selling, structuring and hedging-related costs that are
included in the original issue price and borne by you and because
the secondary market prices will reflect our secondary market
credit spreads and the bid-offer spread that any dealer would
charge in a secondary market transaction of this type as well as
other factors.
The inclusion of the costs of issuing,
selling, structuring and hedging the securities in the original
issue price and the lower rate we are willing to pay as issuer make
the economic terms of the securities less favorable to you than
they otherwise would be.
However, because the costs associated with
issuing, selling, structuring and hedging the securities are not
fully deducted upon issuance, for a period of up to 6 months
following the issue date, to the extent that MS & Co. may buy
or sell the securities in the secondary market, absent changes in
market conditions, including those related to the underlying
stocks, and to our secondary market credit spreads, it would do so
based on values higher than the estimated value, and we expect that
those higher values will also be reflected in your brokerage
account statements.
■The
estimated value of the securities is determined by reference to our
pricing and valuation models, which may differ from those of other
dealers and is not a maximum or minimum secondary market
price. These pricing and valuation models are
proprietary and rely in part on subjective views of certain market
inputs and certain assumptions about future events,
which