Ismael Gastelum
Dec 10th, 2017
David Bourff
Finance 303
Stock Markets
You win some you lose, and that’s how the game is played. I consider the stock market
one big gamble that’s either good to you or chews you up and spits you out broke. However, it
is a bit more predictable than a game of black jack. The game that come to mind would be
poker. In poker, you sit around with your opponents and you get your cards. You see your cards
and you can choose to play the game, and hopefully you know how, but you can always simply
choose to fold. That’s kind of how it is with the stock market. You choose when to play, and
how to play. But what are stock markets? Well let’s dig in and find out.
According to my research the first stock exchange can be traced back to 1531 in
Antwerp, Belgium (Beattie). Back when it first started this was a place to deal with business,
government, and apparently even individual debt. The main participants were Brokers and
money lenders, but what I found interesting is what they used as currency. Investopedia states
that they dealt in bonds (which is ok seeing as how still do this today), but they also dealt with
promissory notes. Meaning they basically dealt with IOU’s. Now stock markets have come a
long way since then, but really our IOU’s just got more sophisticated. Today Stock Markets are
very important to the world. There are several different markets that play a crucial part in the
world’s economies.
There are several stock markets in the world today, and the leading two are the New
York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ. Both are US stock exchanges, and both headquarters are
in New York. Outside of the US we have more markets that are very important. There’s the
Japan Exchange Group, Shanghai Stock Exchange, and Euronext. These five make up for the
world’s top five Stock Exchanges, and here is a small description of each market outside of the
US.
The Japan Exchange Group is a Japanese financial services corporation, and it manages
multiple securities exchanges. It works with securities exchanges like the Tokyo Stock Exchange
and the Osaka Securities Exchange. It is fairly new seeing as how it was just formed in 2013
when the two companies, TSE and OSE, merged together to form the world’s third largest. The
Shanghai Stock Exchange is one of China’s two stock exchanges that operate independently in
