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Learning about your World Stock Exchange

Luc Verville

The New York Stock Exchange is a physical exchange, also referred to as a listed exchange - only stocks listed with the exchange may be traded. Orders enter by way of exchange members and flow down to a floor broker, who goes to the floor trading post specialist for that stock to trade the order. The specialist's job is to match buy and sell orders using open outcry. If a spread exists, no trade immediately takes place-in this case the specialist should use his/her own resources (money or stock) to close the difference after his/her judged time. Once a trade has been made the details are reported on the "tape" and sent back to the brokerage firm, which then notifies the investor who placed the order. Although there is a significant amount of human contact in this process, computers play an important role, especially for so-called "program trading". The NASDAQ is a virtual listed exchange, where all of the trading is done over a computer network. The process is similar to the New York Stock Exchange. However, buyers and sellers are electronically matched. One or more NASDAQ market makers will always provide a bid and ask price at which they will always purchase or sell 'their' stock.[4] The Paris Bourse, now part of Euronext, is an order-driven, electronic stock exchange. It was automated in the late 1980s. Prior to the 1980s, it consisted of an open outcry exchange. Stockbrokers met on the trading floor or the Palais Brongniart. In 1986, the CATS trading system was introduced, and the order matching process was fully automated. From time to time, active trading (especially in large blocks of securities) have moved away from the 'active' exchanges. Securities firms, led by UBS AG, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Credit Suisse Group, already steer 12 percent of U.S. security trades away from the exchanges to their internal systems. That share probably will increase to 18 percent by 2010 as more investment banks bypass the NYSE and NASDAQ and pair buyers and sellers of securities themselves, according to data compiled by Boston-based Aite Group LLC, a brokerage-industry consultant. Now that computers have eliminated the need for trading floors like the Big Board's, the balance of power in equitymarkets is shifting. By bringing more orders in-house, where clients can move big blocks of stock anonymously, brokers pay the exchanges less in fees and capture a bigger share of the $11 billion a year that institutional investors pay in trading commissions as well as the surplus of the century had taken place. by Luc VervilleThank You to WIKIPEDIA for some explaination.

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The London Stock Exchange.

Participants in the stock market range from small individual stock investors to large hedge fund traders, who can be based anywhere. Their orders usually end up with a professional at a stock exchange, who executes the order. Some exchanges are physical locations where transactions are carried out on a trading floor, by a method known as open outcry. This type of auction is used in stock exchanges and commodity exchanges where traders may enter "verbal" bids and offers simultaneously. The other type of stock exchange is a virtual kind, composed of a network of computers where trades are made electronically via traders. Actual trades are based on an auction market model where a potential buyer bids a specific price for a stock and a potential seller asks a specific price for the stock. (Buying or selling at market means you will accept any ask price or bid price for the stock, respectively.) When the bid and ask prices match, a sale takes place, on a first-come-first-served basis if there are multiple bidders or askers at a given price. The purpose of a stock exchange is to facilitate the exchange of securities between buyers and sellers, thus providing a marketplace (virtual or real). The exchanges provide real-time trading information on the listed securities, facilitating price discovery. by Luc VervilleThank You to WIKIPEDIA for some explaination.

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The Tokyo Stock Exchange

Prewar history The Tokyo Stock Exchange was established on May 15, 1878, as the Tokyo Kabushiki Torihikijo under the direction of then-Finance Minister Okuma Shigenobu and capitalist advocate Shibusawa Eiichi. Trading began on June 1, 1878. In 1943, the exchange was combined with ten other stock exchanges in major Japanese cities to form a single Japanese Stock Exchange. The combined exchange was shut down and reorganized shortly after the bombing of Nagasaki. The Tokyo Stock Exchange reopened under its current Japanese name on May 16, 1949, pursuant to the new Securities Exchange Act. The TSE runup from 1983 to 1990 was unprecedented, in 1990 it accounted for over 60% of the world's stock market capitalization (by far the world's largest) before falling precipitously in value and rankings today, but still remains one of the 3 largest exchanges in the world by market capitalization of listed shares. The trading floor of the TSE was closed on April 30, 1999, and the exchange switched to electronic trading for all transactions. A new facility, called TSE Arrows, opened on May 9, 2000. In 2001, the TSE restructured itself as a stock company: before this time, it was structured as an incorporated association with its members as shareholders. The exchange was only able to operate for 90 minutes on November 1, 2005, due to bugs with a newly installed transactions system, developed by Fujitsu, which was supposed to help cope with higher trading volumes. The interruption in trading was the worst in the history of the exchange. Trading was suspended for four-and-a-half hours. During the initial public offering of advertising giant Dentsu, in December 2001, a trader at UBS Warburg, the Swiss investment bank, sent an order of 610,000 shares in this company at 1 yen each, while he intended to sell 1 share at 610,000 yen. The bank lost £71 million. During yet another initial public offering, that of J-Com, on December 8, 2005, an employee at Mizuho Securities Co., Ltd. mistakenly typed an order to sell 600,000 shares at 1 yen, instead of an order to sell 1 share at 600,000 yen. Mizuho failed to catch the error; the Tokyo Stock Exchange initially blocked attempts to cancel the order, resulting in a net loss of 347 million US dollars to be shared between the exchange and Mizuho. Both companies are now trying to deal with their troubles: lack of error checking, lack of safeguards, lack of reliability, lack of transparency, lack of testing, loss of confidence, and loss of profits. On 11 December, the TSE acknowledged that its system was at fault in the Mizuho trade. On 21 December, Takuo Tsurushima, chief executive of the TSE, and two other senior executives resigned over the Mizuho affair. by Luc VervilleThank You to WIKIPEDIA for some explaination.

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