Could someone place an independent film on the stock market?
"When we say ""stock market,"" we are usually thinking of the publicly traded stocks, such as the New York Stock Exchange or the NASDAQ. Shares of individual products do not go on these exchanges, only large corporations.  You won't see a stock ticker symbol for The Force Awakens or for the iPhone 6s Plus.  The reason for this is that when investors buy a stock, they are looking for something that will grow in value theoretically forever. Individual products usually have a limited lifespan. Your movie will (hopefully) generate revenue when it comes out, but after a while sales will slow down after people have seen it. If someone bought a share of stock in a movie on the stock market, they have to realize that eventually the movie will stop making money, and their share of stock won't be worth anything anymore. Instead, people invest in companies that have the potential to make new products, such as Disney or Apple.  So if you were envisioning seeing the ticker symbol of your movie going across the screen on CNBC, sorry, that's not going to happen.  However, you could theoretically sell shares to individual investors for a percentage of the profit. You figure out how much money you need to create the movie, and estimate how much profit you think the movie will earn. Then you find an investor (or group of investors) that is willing to give you the money you need in exchange for a percentage of the profit. Unlike a stock market investor, these investors won't be looking for the long-term growth potential of the resale value of the stock, but simply a share of the profit." Stock is a part ownership of a business. First there has to be a business that people want to own part of because they expect to make a profit from that ownership.  Nobody is going to be interested if the business isn't worth anything.  In other words: sure, you could try to start a movie production house to make this film and others... But unless you are already a major player AND already have a lot of money invested in the studio, forget it. This isn't GoFundMe or Kickstarter. Nobody is going to buy stock because they want a copy of the DVD that you promise will be available in two years' time.
"I have an account with ETrade. Earlier this week I got an offer to participate in the IPO proper (at the IPO price). If Charles Schwab doesn't give you the opportunity, that's a shortcoming of them as a brokerage firm; there are definitely ways for retail investors to invest in it, wise investment or no. (Okay, technically it wasn't an offer to participate, it was a notice that participation was possibly available, various securities-law disclaimers etc withstanding. ""This Web site is neither an offer to sell nor a solicitation to buy these securities. The offer is by prospectus only. This Web site contains a preliminary prospectus for each offering."" etc etc)." "Assuming that you accept the premise that technical analysis is legitimate and useful, it makes sense that it might not work for a small market, or at the very least that it wouldn't be the same for a small market as it is for a large market.  The reason for this is that a large stock market like the U.S. stock market is as close to a perfect market as you will find: Compare this to a small market in a small country. Market information is harder to get, because there are not as many media outlets covering the news. There aren't as many participants. And possibly it might be more expensive to participate in, and there might be more regulatory intervention than with the large market.  All of these things can affect the prices. The closer you get to a perfect market, the closer you get to a point where the prices of the stocks reflect the ""true value"" of the companies, without external forces affecting prices." "Check your broker's IPO list. Adding a new stock to a stock exchange is called ""Initial Public Offering"" (IPO), and most brokers have a list of upcoming IPO's in which their clients can participate." You can contact the french agency for stock regulation and ask them : http://www.amf-france.org/ I'm not aware of any method to own US stocks, but you can trade them as contract for difference, or CFDs as they are commonly known. Since you're hoping to invest around $1000 this might be a better option since you can use leverage. I think George's answer explains fairly well why the brokerages don't allow this - it's not an exchange rule, it's just that the brokerage has to have the shares to lend, and normally those shares come from people's margin, which is impossible on a non-marginable stock. To address the question of what the alternatives are, on popular stocks like SIRI, a deep In-The-Money put is a fairly accurate emulation of an actual short interest.  If you look at the options on SIRI you will see that a $3 (or higher) put has a delta of -$1, which is the same delta as an actual short share. You also don't have to worry about problems like margin calls when buying options.  The only thing you have to worry about is the expiration date, which isn't generally a major issue if you're buying in-the-money options... unless you're very wrong about the direction of the stock, in which case you could lose everything, but that's always a risk with penny stocks no matter how you trade them. At least with a put option, the maximum amount you can lose is whatever you spent on the contract.  With a short sale, a bull rush on the stock could potentially wipe out your entire margin.  That's why, when betting on downward motion in a microcap or penny stock, I actually prefer to use options.  Just be aware that option contracts can generally only move in increments of $0.05, and that your brokerage will probably impose a bid-ask spread of up to $0.10, so the share price has to move down at least 10 cents (or 10% on a roughly $1 stock like SIRI) for you to just break even; definitely don't attempt to use this as a day-trading tool and go for longer expirations if you can. Thanks for the response - ok so maybe the funds could be partially crowd-sourced and partially funded by an accredited investor?  Also yes - having an experienced adviser and a plan in place to replace existing directors sound like good plot devices.  There doesn't really have to be a limitation to banks, the idea comes from the protagonists being upset with the status quo of banking practices (foreclosures, fees, investing in weapons/warzones etc.)  what would you suggest? Take a look at this: http://code.google.com/p/stock-portfolio-manager/ It is an open source project aimed to manage your stock portfolio. Yes, add the stocks/mutual funds that you want and then you would just need to add all the transactions that you theoretically would have made. Performing the look up on the price at each date that you would have sold or bought is quite tedious as well as adding each transaction. There is no country tag, so I will answer the question generally. Is it possible...? Yes, it's possible and common. Is it wise? Ask Barings Bank whether it's a good idea to allow speculative investing. "I guess there are accepted channels for this sort of thing, but I don't really understand why. Couldn't anyone sell them to anyone else at any time in any kind of market? I mean, if I had a friend who was talking the the IPO up, couldn't I have just said, ""Hey Fred, I'll sell you a Facebook share in two weeks time for thirty five bucks"" and be done with it?  Do exchanges provide legal services? Is there a law that says you have to go through them? And even if you *did* have to go through them, why wouldn't multiple exchanges list them instead of just one, and why wouldn't an exchange start listing them from the minute the gun fired (or before)?" "If you own a stake large enough to do that, you became regulated - under Section 13(d) of the 1934 Act and Regulation (in case of US stock) and you became regulated. Restricting you from ""shocking"" market. Another thing is that your broker will probably not allow you to execute order like that - directed MKT order for such volume. And market is deeper than anyone could measure - darkpools and HFTs passively waiting for opportunities like that." I wouldn't think so.  If you read the list of features listed on the page you referred to, notice: Track Stocks It looks like it is restricted to the major U.S. stock markets.  No mention of India's NSE. "No, assuming by ""public company"" you mean a corporation.  The shareholder's individual liability is limited to their investment.  Your shares can go to zero value, but that's the limit. EDIT In regard to the follow-up question in the comments: ""Are all companies in the stock market corporations?"" the answer is definitely ""no.""  I cannot say much about other countries, but the US markets have some entities which are known as ""master limited partnerships.""  These trade shares on the market by the usual rules, but if you buy you become a partner in the company rather than a shareholder.  You still have limited liability in this case, but there will be differences, for example, in how you're are taxed." The idea of a stockmarket is multiple people betting on the value of an asset and then getting paid the difference between their bet and the real value of the asset.  The goal being to keep the value of the stock as accurate as possible so capital is allocated to companies that will use it most efficiently.  The reward for people making these bets is a portion of that capital.    What you are suggesting is just a graph of the average happiness.  The difficult part of turning this into a market, is being able to assign value to happiness, value that you can gain or lose by choice.      Ironically, money is a indicator of happiness.  When apple came out with the iPhone, people saw it and decided it would make them happier if they owned it creating demand.  Investors noticed that people believed owning an iphone would make them happier so they bid up the price of AAPL stock.  People are happier with their iPhones and investors benefitted from this happiness and got cash allowing them to spend money on things to increase their happiness.    In order to extract happiness from the stock market a lot of other things come into play.  A biotech company curing cancer would be a solution to something that drastically decreases happiness.  Increasing alcohol sales might be a result of people trying to offset the sadness in the short term but in the long term it is a depressant and doesn't make you happy.  An individual might be happier with an extra $10B but overall 1 million people getting $10k each would increase average happiness much more.  But somebody like buffet can invest in companies that can generate way more happiness than just handing out cash.    The happiness report is an annual report of happiness.  Looking at these results next to the Gini coefficient (income inequality), and industry growth by country might start to give you an idea of what affects happiness.  For instance in Africa income inequality could sky rocket while the stock market plummets and happiness could still increase because of public health investments made years ago, causing the infant mortality rate to plummet.  If you want to think about this topic I recommend reading the great escape by Angus Deaton.