Articles - Snippits

The story of the US stock exchange is very patchy and uneven with positive and negative trends. Two exchanges compose this stock market. The first is the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the second, the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations system (NASDAQ).

The New York Stock exchange is more than a hundred and fifty years old and has the largest volume of stocks traded in the world in dollar terms. In terms of volumes, the New York Stock Exchange comes second, losing out to the NASDAQ, another exchange in the US stock market. The market capitalization of the NYSE is the highest in the world and runs into trillions of dollars.

The US Stock market provides a convenient way by which a common stock holder can trade in stocks by selling and buying them easily. This trading can be done electronically in both the exchanges. NYSE offers the facility of trading on the floor, though trading on the floor is restricted to members or "seat" owners. These seats are very limited in number and are very sought after because of which they come at a price. Currently one has to pay a price of around $4 million to become the seat owner at NYSE.

If you wish to understand the general trend in the stock prices, each and every stock exchange has it own index which is made up of the prices of most important stocks traded and quoted in the exchange. In the USA there are 3 major indices which are: the NASDAQ index, the S&P index and the Dow Jones index. These indices are further expanded to show a sector-wise performance.

Stock exchanges use stock symbols for denoting the stocks. These are essentially short forms of the company names. You can easily look up the history, current quotes and trends of any company from the stock exchange websites if you know the symbol.

The history of the stock markets in the US is both interesting and informative. Among the notable events during its long history, the crash of 1929 is perhaps the most significant one. The black Tuesday of 1929 is considered as the worst day in the history of the US stock market. The largest quantum of selling was completed on that single day. The crash of 1929 eroded more than $100 billion in investors' assets. This would be worth several hundred times more in today's dollar values.

Now a days people, who do not have the expertise to manage their own investments, have several avenues available to invest their spare money. Such avenues are invest stocks and mutual fund organizations. Eventhough these companies manage their investments professionally, one should be aware that all of them are not equally good. One should make their own research before investing through any of these avenues. Hence if you have some money to spare, it would be a wise idea to invest stocks.