After the market's close, Blackstone submitted its S-1 filing with the SEC's EDGAR database.

The company manages about $78.7 billion in assets and has interests in private equity, real estate, hedge funds, debt funds and closed-end funds. The firm even has its own advisory arm, which helps with restructurings and M&A.

The key to success has been the stellar long-term returns. The corporate private equity funds have posted an average annual return of 30.8% since 1987. Although, its real estate annual returns have been 38.2% (since 1991).

Keep in mind that Blackstone gets "generally" 20% of the profits on these returns (known as the "carried interest"). And that's why the company has been a cash machine.

From 2002 to 2006, revenues surged from $318.1 million to $1.1 billion and net income increased from $39 million to $2.26 billion.

OK, so how can profits be higher than revenues? Well, the reason is that Blackstone harvested a ton of gains from its investments in 2006.

In the prospectus, the principals wanted to make the following observations on the IPO:

• Our corporate private equity and real estate businesses have benefited from high levels of activity in the last few years. These activity levels may continue, but could decline at any time because of factors we cannot control.
• While the long-term growth trends in our businesses are favorable, there may be significant fluctuations in our financial results from quarter to quarter. Our common units should only be purchased by investors who expect to remain unitholders for a number of years.
• We intend to continue to follow the management approach that has served us well as a private firm of focusing on making the right decisions about purchasing and selling the right assets at the right time and at the right prices, without regard to how those decisions affect our financial results in any given quarter.

The underwriters include Morgan Stanley (NYSE: MS), Citigroup (NYSE: C), Merrill Lynch & Co. (NYSE: MER), Credit Suisse (NYSE: CS), Lehman Brothers (NYSE: LEH) and Deutsche Bank Securities (there is no Goldman Sachs).

Blackstone plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange but did not disclose a ticker symbol.

For more Blackstone news, read BloggingBuyouts.com.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and the EDGAR-Online Guide to Decoding Financial Statements.