What is the Stock Market?

Definition

At the stock market, stocks of listed companies are dealt. The term stock market is used for the overall stocks sold and bought at stock exchanges. A group of organizations can constitute a stock exchange to perform share dealings. For example, USA NASDAQ and NYSE are stock exchanges.

Functionality

In the stock exchange everyone can participate with respective stocks. It doesn’t matter where it is based or how much stock the trader possesses. In the stock market, small investors to big traders everybody trade together. The price of a stock depends on the demand and supply of that particular stock. In stock markets, the share dealing is done by a middleman. The person is known as a share broker. The seller and buyer mutually decide the price of the trade. There is an open place in the stock market for trading and the process is known as open outcry. Here traders gather and wildly shout their individual quote to sell their stock. In this kind of auction (the ‘verbal bid’) the bidding price changes simultaneously and stops only when a bid is singled out as the highest. The other type of trading is virtual and performed on the computer. In this type of exchange, traders sitting on computer terminals bid through computers within a network.

Paul Cris