Melco International Development just put up a trial balloon to gauge interest in a possible initial public offering for Studio City Macau. It probably won’t happen. It you thought Caesars had a complicated corporate structure, wait until you get a look at Studio City’s fractionated ownership map. An IPO would make it even more complicated, and that alone is enough to discourage investors from buying shares at decent premiums. If an IPO does take place, it will be very difficult to figure out who owns what and how much. Of course it’ll be known according to law, but shares that represent a fraction of a percentage of a stake of a subsidiary that you have to do a whole equation to figure out exactly what they are, do not generally inspire much IPO excitement.

Here’s how it works…maybe. Studio City is 60% owned by Melco Resorts & Entertainment. 40% is owned by private firm New Cotai Holdings, which is jointly owned by Silver Point Capital and Oaktree Capital Management. Oaktree Capital Management (OAK) is itself an NYSE-listed company, meaning some part of the shares are owned by a publicly-traded owner of a private entity that owns part of another private entity that is 40% owned by another publicly-traded entity. It you think that sentence is hard to understand, try writing it.

Given all this corporate mess, who is going to buy shares? You won’t even really know what you’re getting exactly, so it’s very difficult to put a price on the shares rationally. Other media outlets are putting the wacky corporate organization lightly. “…[I]t creates additional complexity for Melco, a company which is already complicated, by Macau standards,” writes the South China Morning Post. Tell me about it.

The IPO news being floated could actually be precisely because of the confusing structure here. The main owners may want to know a ball park of how the market values any shares the public can collectively buy, and from there they would have a better idea of how much they actually have from their stake, and how much they can sell it for if need be. It doesn’t cost much to file a private document with the SEC, say something about offering shares when market conditions are right, and give no general price points or estimates on the number of shares being offered. Plus, conditions in Macau right now are delicate, not the best time to move forward with IPOs. A trade war between the US and China looks more and more likely, and the whole North Korea situation, which thank goodness calmed down a bit yesterday, could still boil over again any day.