Riyadh/Dubai: The imminent listing of Aramco will be a pivotal moment for Saudi Arabia's Tadawul stock exchange.
The Tadawul has said it has been preparing for years and is primed for the long-awaited share sale in coming weeks. But hosting possibly the biggest initial public offering in history represents a huge leap into the big league for a 12-year-old exchange.
"You have to have really robust technology in order to support the spike that's expected with a high-profile IPO," said Spencer Mindlin, an analyst at Aite Group.
The Tadawul might argue though that it has learned from missteps made elsewhere in big listings like Facebook's.
It brought in a new trading platform developed by Nasdaq in 2015, while last year Saudi Arabia's Capital Market Authority introduced a price stabilisation mechanism to prevent large share price drops in newly listed companies.
Some advisers working on the IPO say the Saudi stock market's ability to handle the deal was one of the main questions coming from investors.
"They're asking who are the cornerstones, is there liquidity in the market, how much will be leveraged, is there any potential risks with margin calls?" said one banker.
Share sales of the world's most profitable company will begin on November 17, according to the IPO prospectus published on Saturday.
Aramco could offer 1pc-2pc of its shares, raising as much as $20 billion to $40 billion, sources have told Reuters. A deal over $25 billion would top the record IPO of Chinese retail titan Alibaba on the New York Stock Exchange in 2014.
The Saudi exchange has been bullish, with its chief Khalid Al Hussan saying this month that it was "ready to receive the largest listing in the history of financial markets".
In its IPO prospectus, Aramco said recent changes to trading mechanisms, to modernise the platform and align with international standards, were "untested and there can be no assurance that they will adequately facilitate the listing of and expected high trading volume in the shares".
The changes mean there is now a smaller window between when a company's shares are priced, sold and then admitted to trading, which could risk a delay to the listing, the prospectus said.
The past two years have seen several major investment banks join the exchange as members including Goldman Sachs and Citi, meaning they can broker and deal there, providing more outlets to help investors to trade.
But volume on the market this year so far is sluggish.
In 2015, when foreign funds started buying Saudi stocks, the average daily traded value was $1.8 billion.
"They (the Tadawul) have been working over the past couple of years on improving the market and making it ready for Aramco's IPO, however I don't think they have done stress tests yet," said Saudi economist Fadl Alboainain.
To avoid the risk of a slew of sell orders hitting the exchange following the IPO - companies listing usually aim for a bounce on their debut followed by relatively steady trading - Aramco plans to grant bonus shares to Saudi retail investors who keep the stock for six months.
The Saudi government has also committed not to sell any more shares for at least a year. Retail investors, who could snap up as much as a quarter of the shares put up for sale, say they have been preparing for months by saving money, selling land plots and exiting other stocks.