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1.Equities /Stocks/ Shares all mean the same thing. Buying a Share literally means buying part of the company i.e.you own a ‘share’ of the company.

 2.Unlike bonds paying a coupon, Shares pay dividends although many companies choose not to pay dividends and reinvest earnings to grow the business instead.Investors are happy with as this investor type is more interested in capital growth than dividend income.

 3.Most shares are known as ‘Common Stock’ and if a company ‘goes bust’ it is common stockholders that get paid last. Bondholders and Preferred Stockholders get paid first.

 4.Stock Markets represent the current, and more importantly, the future economic outlook for that country’s economy.Stock markets tend to have a very forward view of a country’s economic outlook and the market performance can have a surprisingly low correlation with the current economic numbers being released.

 5.The major worldwide stock markets are

New York (main indices are S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial, Nasdaq)

London (FTSE 100, FTSE All Share)

Frankfurt (Dax 30), Paris (CAC 40), Amsterdam (AEX) and Switzerland (SMI)

Tokyo (Nikkei 225)

Hong Kong (Hang Seng)

 6.Most nations that promote an element of private enterprise have a national stock exchange.

 7.Approximately 70% of all stock trades are ‘electronic’; the Buy Side sends the order to the Sell Side via an electronic trading platform/software.

Some of the main Buy Side to Sell Side platforms include Chi-X, BATS, SETS (from the London Stock Exchange), FLEX Trade, Bloomberg (although the latter handles transactions for Fixed Income and FX as well).

 8.Just like the US Treasury Bond Market leads other markets to some extent the US Stock markets leads other global stock markets.

9.The saying “When the US sneezes the rest if the world catches an cold” comes to mind ; an ‘economic cold’ that is!

10. Like Bond Traders …Equity Traders are not geniuses but rather advance by being in the right place at the right time within a Buy Side or Sell Side organisation!