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market_rouletteThis is a short, very simplified (because holy shit, let me say, complex), and easy to follow tutorial on markets and exchanges, part 1
Over the next year,jamethiel and I will be adding options on as googledocs allows, among them ETF's, mutual funds, and my personal favorites of complexity, IPOs. Each will be announced ahead of time, explained as thoroughly as we can, and a solid date for when trading can begin on them given. Any major updates or changes to gameplay will occur in April, July, or October, since quarters are easy ways to split the year. So everyone has plenty of time.
Current Gameplay for January
1.) There are no transaction fees for anything.
This was announced in an earlier post, but there's been a lot of information, so it was probably easy to miss. There are no transaction fees this month. This is to get used to buying and selling, reading about your companies, and knowing what to look for, and getting adapted to tickers and recognizing them. This is also to encourage you to try out new things.
2.) There are unlimited takebacks.
You can kill a buy at any time in the month of January and redo. In the same thread as you originally bought something, add a Takeback to the subject line, and we'll remove it. All trades that are still not in Takeback stand when January ends.
By the end of January, provided you go a little crazy, which I encourage highly, you should be able to look up a company, find the ticker, ID the price and time, and post it without worry. You should be able to calculate the total cost.
And you should be able to tell us what exchange it trades on.
That part, that's new.
The Stock Exchange and You
An exchange works like a town's only grocery store. All the town has to trade there, because where else do you get your tomatoes? Nowhere. At least, that's how it used to be, and in a lot of places, that's how it still is. Not all countries have a stock exchange. Most do, or they work with other countries and combine with them to make one. "Work with" can be a euphemism for "they were manipulated into it" or "had no choice because their economic conditions kind of left them vulnerable" or "their leadership wants to be super rich", but this isn't going to be a historical perspective so much as a basic guideline to what to look for and how to find it.
Buying and trading shares is ancient, the stock exchange is ancient, the concept is ancient; where there have been companies, there has been a stock exchange of some kind. Ownership could be limited to the aristocracy, limited to everyone but the aristocracy, limited to only certain classes, limited to only certain types in certain classes, or limited only to icky tradespeople types if you look at European history.
We're not doing anything new, per se; on the other hand, we are. Most of us would not have been born to a social class or economic class that let us buy and sell ownership in companies. Most of us did not have the necessary genetic chromosomes to be allowed to own anything. For some of us, we didn't have the necessary genetic chromosomes to be allowed to learn to read, write, or do arithmetic.
More practically speaking, even doing all that, the education to be able to do it well is still lacking; that, we will do for ourselves. By the end of gameplay, you will not be a world class stockbroker, nor will I send everyone out encouraging you to join e-trade. But you will know the basics of what this is, what it does, what to look for, and what it means. What I will do is link you up to the world-class games that do what we're doing, but better, with more complexity, and huge servers behind them to play with realistic real-world conditions. And if you ever do start trading in real life, you'll be able to ask the right questions and understand the right answers. You'll also win at Jeopardy.
Seriously, when the stock market comes up in Jeopardy? I kick ass.
The Stock Exchange - It's Really a Grocery Store. Sort of
A stock exchange is an entity that provides people a place to buy and trade securities--stocks, bonds, etc. A grocery store for the product. You see why I like this one.
We think of it in places--the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE), the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX), the Singapore Exchange (SGX). We associate it with television and movies showing many energetic people bouncing around a room wearing headsets looking really intense or, sometimes, suicidal. That's the physical location of an exchange, yes. And for all intents and purposes, for years, that was the case.
It's not, though; a stock exchange is not a place. An exchange is a business. Like any business, it settles somewhere, opens shop, finds regulations, complies (hopefully) and within the regulations of the government of the country it is located in, offers to be the facilitator for people to buy securities. It's expensive, complicated, you have to deal with government red tape at all levels just to deal with stocks in the country, much less stocks that aren't, and once you had your niche, you didn't share well.
Exchanges are, and were for a long time, monopolies. Depending on the size and population of your country, you may have more than one, but a lot of times, they didn't offer the same securities or products, which we'll get into with futures, currency, options, and other types of non-stock and bonds related securities.
A stock exchange is a company. It is not chained to a place, though mostly, like any company, it stays headquartered in a single place or few places and becomes associated with it. London Stock Exchange is, y'know, in London. They could move to Basingstoke if they wanted to. But they tend to choose places where it's easy for companies who want to use them to use them, and up until maybe a couple of decades ago, physical proximity was kinda necessary. You had to do your trading either in person--see television--or by mail, telegraph, telephone, or by the equivalent of trading email. In person was the fastest still (kind of).
In person is almost the fastest now. Even email has to wait to be read, even electronic orders have to go through some kind of computer system and we're not talking five or six million a second. We're talking transactions of billions a second. It has to go through layers of companies and systems. And it's funny to think about this while we surf the web and think everything is instantaneous; for us, yeah. In the real world, our own governments (all of us) still can't figure out how to block pop-ups on their computer systems and sometimes still use Windows NT. The Federal Aviation Administration in the US is using a computer system dated from possibly before some of us were born. To create a program that can do what a stock exchange does now is complicated, to understate it. To create a program to do what a stock exchange could do is even more so.
The bigger something is, the slower it moves, and the stock exchange is no exception. This is changing, fast, but not as fast as we want it to. In a lot of ways, a stock exchange is still place-oriented. But not always.
Getting Your Product on the Shelf
To sell your stock on an exchange, you must be listed on that exchange. To sell on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), you have to be listed there. This is the listing of the NYSE. To get listed, you have to fulfill their requirements, whatever they may be. They can pretty much make any requirement they want to. There are exchanges that require you to be located in a certain place. There are exchanges that require you to comply with Sharia or Kosher law* (this is another kind of complicated which I am so not qualified to go into). Sometimes the requirements only apply to certain groups, entities, people, or are based on the laws of teh country they're in.
In general, an exchange is a company that wants to make money, and to get listed, you have to be a company that will make them money. Here is a list of ways to get listed on NYSE Euronext. I feel a lot better about my Americancentrism because the word Euronext is there. Because Euronext is taking over the world. Sort of.
To sell your stock on an exchange, you must be listed. To buy a stock on an exchange, you must be a member. And the members of an exchange are the companies and people who act as stockbrokers, who buy and sell stocks for companies and people.
Microsoft does not itself send someone to sell stock for them. They contract with a member of a stock exchange to do that.
I use the self-service brokerage Sharebuilder. Sharebuilder is a subsidary, part of, ING Financial Markets. ING is listed as a member of NYSE. Ergo, I can trade on NYSE. At least, in the US. We'll go into how that works later.
This is an application for membership to the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX).
So here's what we know:
Stock Exchange - a company or entity that facilitates the buying and trading of securities (such as stock). It is located in a place, but it is not a place. It is a company.
Listing - companies that can sell securities on an exchange. They do not do this themselves as a rule. They get a member of the exchange to do it.
Membership - companies that do the buying and the selling. Sometimes, they cause the Great Depression. Sometimes, they don't.
On the MasterList spreadsheet, the last sheet named Copy of Participants has a short list of your markets. This list will be expanded.
On the sheet labeled AllMarkets (second one), that's a running list of all stock exchanges in the world. It is a work in progress and is not complete.
Your Market shows up here as well.
Final Note
Questions, corrections, changes, for the love of God, please do so. This will go into more detail and complexity in following entries, so this needs to make sense first. And come April, it will come into gameplay.
Over the next year,
jamethiel and I will be adding options on as googledocs allows, among them ETF's, mutual funds, and my personal favorites of complexity, IPOs. Each will be announced ahead of time, explained as thoroughly as we can, and a solid date for when trading can begin on them given. Any major updates or changes to gameplay will occur in April, July, or October, since quarters are easy ways to split the year. So everyone has plenty of time.Current Gameplay for January
1.) There are no transaction fees for anything.
This was announced in an earlier post, but there's been a lot of information, so it was probably easy to miss. There are no transaction fees this month. This is to get used to buying and selling, reading about your companies, and knowing what to look for, and getting adapted to tickers and recognizing them. This is also to encourage you to try out new things.
2.) There are unlimited takebacks.
You can kill a buy at any time in the month of January and redo. In the same thread as you originally bought something, add a Takeback to the subject line, and we'll remove it. All trades that are still not in Takeback stand when January ends.
By the end of January, provided you go a little crazy, which I encourage highly, you should be able to look up a company, find the ticker, ID the price and time, and post it without worry. You should be able to calculate the total cost.
And you should be able to tell us what exchange it trades on.
That part, that's new.
The Stock Exchange and You
An exchange works like a town's only grocery store. All the town has to trade there, because where else do you get your tomatoes? Nowhere. At least, that's how it used to be, and in a lot of places, that's how it still is. Not all countries have a stock exchange. Most do, or they work with other countries and combine with them to make one. "Work with" can be a euphemism for "they were manipulated into it" or "had no choice because their economic conditions kind of left them vulnerable" or "their leadership wants to be super rich", but this isn't going to be a historical perspective so much as a basic guideline to what to look for and how to find it.
Buying and trading shares is ancient, the stock exchange is ancient, the concept is ancient; where there have been companies, there has been a stock exchange of some kind. Ownership could be limited to the aristocracy, limited to everyone but the aristocracy, limited to only certain classes, limited to only certain types in certain classes, or limited only to icky tradespeople types if you look at European history.
We're not doing anything new, per se; on the other hand, we are. Most of us would not have been born to a social class or economic class that let us buy and sell ownership in companies. Most of us did not have the necessary genetic chromosomes to be allowed to own anything. For some of us, we didn't have the necessary genetic chromosomes to be allowed to learn to read, write, or do arithmetic.
More practically speaking, even doing all that, the education to be able to do it well is still lacking; that, we will do for ourselves. By the end of gameplay, you will not be a world class stockbroker, nor will I send everyone out encouraging you to join e-trade. But you will know the basics of what this is, what it does, what to look for, and what it means. What I will do is link you up to the world-class games that do what we're doing, but better, with more complexity, and huge servers behind them to play with realistic real-world conditions. And if you ever do start trading in real life, you'll be able to ask the right questions and understand the right answers. You'll also win at Jeopardy.
Seriously, when the stock market comes up in Jeopardy? I kick ass.
The Stock Exchange - It's Really a Grocery Store. Sort of
A stock exchange is an entity that provides people a place to buy and trade securities--stocks, bonds, etc. A grocery store for the product. You see why I like this one.
We think of it in places--the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) in New York, the Shanghai Stock Exchange (SSE), the Abu Dhabi Securities Exchange (ADX), the Singapore Exchange (SGX). We associate it with television and movies showing many energetic people bouncing around a room wearing headsets looking really intense or, sometimes, suicidal. That's the physical location of an exchange, yes. And for all intents and purposes, for years, that was the case.
It's not, though; a stock exchange is not a place. An exchange is a business. Like any business, it settles somewhere, opens shop, finds regulations, complies (hopefully) and within the regulations of the government of the country it is located in, offers to be the facilitator for people to buy securities. It's expensive, complicated, you have to deal with government red tape at all levels just to deal with stocks in the country, much less stocks that aren't, and once you had your niche, you didn't share well.
Exchanges are, and were for a long time, monopolies. Depending on the size and population of your country, you may have more than one, but a lot of times, they didn't offer the same securities or products, which we'll get into with futures, currency, options, and other types of non-stock and bonds related securities.
A stock exchange is a company. It is not chained to a place, though mostly, like any company, it stays headquartered in a single place or few places and becomes associated with it. London Stock Exchange is, y'know, in London. They could move to Basingstoke if they wanted to. But they tend to choose places where it's easy for companies who want to use them to use them, and up until maybe a couple of decades ago, physical proximity was kinda necessary. You had to do your trading either in person--see television--or by mail, telegraph, telephone, or by the equivalent of trading email. In person was the fastest still (kind of).
In person is almost the fastest now. Even email has to wait to be read, even electronic orders have to go through some kind of computer system and we're not talking five or six million a second. We're talking transactions of billions a second. It has to go through layers of companies and systems. And it's funny to think about this while we surf the web and think everything is instantaneous; for us, yeah. In the real world, our own governments (all of us) still can't figure out how to block pop-ups on their computer systems and sometimes still use Windows NT. The Federal Aviation Administration in the US is using a computer system dated from possibly before some of us were born. To create a program that can do what a stock exchange does now is complicated, to understate it. To create a program to do what a stock exchange could do is even more so.
The bigger something is, the slower it moves, and the stock exchange is no exception. This is changing, fast, but not as fast as we want it to. In a lot of ways, a stock exchange is still place-oriented. But not always.
Getting Your Product on the Shelf
To sell your stock on an exchange, you must be listed on that exchange. To sell on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), you have to be listed there. This is the listing of the NYSE. To get listed, you have to fulfill their requirements, whatever they may be. They can pretty much make any requirement they want to. There are exchanges that require you to be located in a certain place. There are exchanges that require you to comply with Sharia or Kosher law* (this is another kind of complicated which I am so not qualified to go into). Sometimes the requirements only apply to certain groups, entities, people, or are based on the laws of teh country they're in.
In general, an exchange is a company that wants to make money, and to get listed, you have to be a company that will make them money. Here is a list of ways to get listed on NYSE Euronext. I feel a lot better about my Americancentrism because the word Euronext is there. Because Euronext is taking over the world. Sort of.
To sell your stock on an exchange, you must be listed. To buy a stock on an exchange, you must be a member. And the members of an exchange are the companies and people who act as stockbrokers, who buy and sell stocks for companies and people.
Microsoft does not itself send someone to sell stock for them. They contract with a member of a stock exchange to do that.
I use the self-service brokerage Sharebuilder. Sharebuilder is a subsidary, part of, ING Financial Markets. ING is listed as a member of NYSE. Ergo, I can trade on NYSE. At least, in the US. We'll go into how that works later.
This is an application for membership to the Australian Stock Exchange (ASX).
So here's what we know:
Stock Exchange - a company or entity that facilitates the buying and trading of securities (such as stock). It is located in a place, but it is not a place. It is a company.
Listing - companies that can sell securities on an exchange. They do not do this themselves as a rule. They get a member of the exchange to do it.
Membership - companies that do the buying and the selling. Sometimes, they cause the Great Depression. Sometimes, they don't.
On the MasterList spreadsheet, the last sheet named Copy of Participants has a short list of your markets. This list will be expanded.
On the sheet labeled AllMarkets (second one), that's a running list of all stock exchanges in the world. It is a work in progress and is not complete.
Your Market shows up here as well.
Final Note
Questions, corrections, changes, for the love of God, please do so. This will go into more detail and complexity in following entries, so this needs to make sense first. And come April, it will come into gameplay.
no subject
Date: 2011-01-07 10:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-01-08 01:26 pm (UTC)