Why are there so many stock exchanges in the world?
"Nearly every country has its own exchange because so many countries have their own currency, and currency permeates every part of an exchange's business.   Generally, an exchange will support transaction and settlement only in local currency.  Securities (except those that explicitly enable FX trading) are denominated and will trade in a single currency-- you can only buy a share of IBM in U.S. dollars.  Securities trading always seeks to be a clean, frictionless, scalable process, and adding cross-currency translation to the mix would just complicate things.  So it's one exchange, one currency. In most countries, citizens and even businesses are largely restricted to having bank accounts in local currency.  There are various political reasons for this, but there it is:  it is difficult or impossible to open a domestic bank account in a foreign-denominated currency.  A public company headquartered in a given country will be required to publish financial statements in local currency, will be more likely to do business with the local citizenry and businesses in that currency, and so will likely look for investors from that same pool-- which generally means listing in local currency, which means on an exchange in that country. There are exceptions, of course.  Big multinationals do business all over the world, and many seek investors all over the world as well.  Mechanisms have been created to permit this (American Depositary Receipts or ADRs, for example).  But once again, cross-currency translation makes things more complicated, so ADRs and their like are only practical for very big international players. As to why there may be many exchanges in a single country, IMO Nick R has it right.  Read ""Flash Boys""; many market makers profit from trading between exchanges, and so have an interest in there being many of them.  And in the U.S., regulators have expressed an interest in ""innovation"" in the exchange space, and so permit them.  There is also an argument to be made against having a single ""Too Big To Fail"" exchange just like the argument for banks, but I wouldn't call that a ""reason"" for the current state of affairs." Stock exchanges have been undergoing a period of consolidation for the past hundred years for the exact reasons you mentioned. The existence of digital trading, harmonized laws and regulations, and fewer relevant currencies have made it more practical for mergers and acquisitions between exchanges. Stock exchanges are most often times private companies that compete with other exchanges, so that also promotes the existence of many exchanges. "Why are there so many stock exchanges in the world?  The simple answer is that there is a lot of money to be made by charging fees to facilitate the trading of securities, but there are other factors at play here relating to new technologies. Trading volumes have increased rapidly in recent years.  According to this ITG data, in 1997, 6.5 billion shares were traded on US exchanges.  By 2015 this number had increased to 40.8 billion shares.  There are a number of reasons for this rapid increase in volumes.  Most significant would be the introduction of new technologies that allow for high volume, high frequency trading. This increase in activity has be accompanied by an increase in the number of stock exchanges.  As CQM points out in his answer, there has been considerable consolidation in the ownership of ""legacy"" exchanges.  For example, the NYSE merged with EuroNext in 2007, and the combined group is now owned by the Intercontinental Exchange, which also owns numerous smaller stock exchanges as well as a number of derivative/commodities exchanges. However, this consolidation in ownership has been more than matched by the creation of many ""virtual"" exchanges.   In North America these virtual exchanges are called ""Alternative Trading Systems"".  In Europe, they are called ""Multilateral Trading Facilities"".   These new virtual exchanges, sometimes referred to as ""dark pools"", have begun to significantly eat away at the volumes of the legacy exchanges.  If you look at the ITG data (linked above), you will see that the total volume of shares traded on legacy exchanges actually peaked in 2008, and has since then has decreased.  This coincides roughly with the appearance of the virtual exchanges and the new high frequency trading methods.  According to this paper from the SEC site, dated 2013, Alternative Trading Systems accounted for 11.3% of total volumes in 2012.  This will have increased rapidly in the years since 2012.  It is this loss of business that has prompted the consolidation in the ownership of the legacy exchanges. These new exchange are ""conceptually the same"" as the legacy exchanges and must play by the same regulatory rules."
The total value of the stock market more or less tracks the total value of the companies listed in the stock market, which is more or less the total value of the US economy (since very few industries are nationalized or dominated by privately held companies). The US economy has consistently grown over time, thanks to the wonders of industrialization, the discovery of new markets, new natural resources, etc.  Thus, the stock market has continued to grow as well. Will it forever?  No.  The United States will not exist for ever.  But there's no obvious reason it won't continue to grow, at least for a while, though of course if I could accurately predict that I would be far richer than I am. Why do other countries not have the same result?  China is its own ball of wax since it's a sort-of-market-sort-of-command economy.  Japan has major issues economically right now and doesn't really have the natural or people resources; it also had a huge market bubble a while back that it's never recovered from. And many European countries are doing fine.  German's DAX30 index was at around 2500 in 2004 and is now at nearly 13000.  That's pretty fast growth. If you go back further (there was a crash ending in around 2004), you can see around the fall of the Berlin wall it was still around 2000; even going that far back, that's about an 8% annual bump.  The FTSE was also around 2000 back then, around 8000 now, which is around 5% annual growth.   Many of these indexes were more seriously hurt than the US markets in the two major crashes of this millenium; while the US markets fell a lot in 2008, they didn't fall nearly as much as many smaller markets in 2002, so had less to recover from.  Both DAX and FTSE suffered similar falls in 2002 to 2008, and so even though during good periods they've grown quite quickly, they haven't overall done as well as they could have given the crashes. You don't have to go through an exchange. That wasn't the problem. It was that the people trading on them wouldn't be willing to take your offer. An exchange can't just list a company. They need that company's consent and the company need's the exchange's consent. I don't know if you're aware of this but that was also an entirely new disaster during Facebook's IPO. Computer glitches didn't help. What you're talking about is a called a secondary market, kind of. Stock exchanges offer those too, especially for options.   That's the typical stock footage you see of guys on wall street yelling and screaming while throwing paper up in the air. I don't know why stocks in some industries tend to have lower prices per share than others. It doesn't really matter much. Whether a company has 1,000,0000 shares selling for $100 each, or 10,000,000 shares selling for $10 each, either way the total value is the same. Companies generally like to keep the share price relatively low so that if someone wants to buy a small amount, they can. Like if the price was $10,000 per share, than an investor with less than $10,000 to put in that one stock would be priced out of the market. If it's $10, then if someone wants $10 they can buy one share, and if someone wants $10,000 they can buy 1000 shares. As to why energy stocks are volatile, I can think of several reasons. One, in our current world, energy is highly susceptible to politics. A lot of the world's energy comes from the Middle East, which is a notoriously unstable region. Any time there's conflict there, energy supplies from the region become uncertain. Oil-producing countries may embargo countries that they don't like. A war will, at the very least, interfere with transportation and shipping, and may result in oil wells being destroyed. Etc. Two, energy is consumed when you use it, and most consumers have very limited ability to stockpile. So you're constantly buying the energy you need as you need it. So if demand goes down, it is reflected immediately. Compare this to, say, clothing. Most people expect to keep the same clothes for years, wearing them repeatedly. (Hopefully washing them now and then!) So if for some reason you decided today that you only need three red shirts instead of four, this might not have any immediate impact on your buying. It could be months before you would have bought a new red shirt anyway. There is a tendency for the market to react rather slowly to changes in demand for shirts. But with energy, if you decide you only need to burn 3 gallons of gas per week instead of 4, your consumption goes down immediately, within days. Three, really adding to number two, energy is highly perishable, especially some forms of energy. If a solar power station is capable of producing 10 megawatts but today there is only demand for 9 megawatts, you can't save the unused megawatt for some future time when demand is higher. It's gone. (You can charge a battery with it, but that's pretty limited.) You can pile up coal or store natural gas in a tank until you need it, but you can't save the output of a power plant. Note numbers two and three also apply to food, which is why food production is also very volatile. It might be easiest to think of stock exchanges like brokers.  If you buy a home, and your broker goes bankrupt, you still own your home, but you could not sell it without the aid of another broker.   Same with stocks, you own the stocks you buy, but you would be unable to either purchase new stocks or sell your stock holdings without an exchange. The stock market's principal justification is matching investors with investment opportunities.  That's only reasonably feasible with long-term investments.  High frequency traders are not interested in investments, they are interested in buying cheap and selling expensive.  Holding reasonably robust shares for longer binds their capital which is one reason the faster-paced business of dealing with options is popular instead.  So their main manner of operation is leeching off actually occuring investments by letting the investors pay more than the recipients of the investments receive. By now, the majority of stock market business is indirect and tries guessing where the money goes rather than where the business goes. For one thing, this leads to the stock market's evaluations being largely inflated over the actual underlying committed deals happening.  And as the commitment to an investment becomes rare, the market becomes more volatile and instable: it's money running in circles. Fast trading is about running in front of where the money goes, anticipating the market.  But if there is no actual market to anticipate, only people running before the imagination of other people running before money, the net payout converges to zero as the ratio of serious actual investments in tangible targets declines. By and large, high frequency trading converges to a Ponzi scheme, and you try being among the winners of such a scheme.  But there are a whole lot of people competing here, and essentially the net payoff is close to zero due to the large volumes in circulation as opposed to what ends up in actual tangible investments. It's a completely different game with different rules riding on the original idea of a stock market.  So you have to figure out what your money should be doing according to your plans. Non-electronic stock exchanges still exist because they used to exist. There are a lot of people in trading firms who grew up with floor trading and don't want to give it up, either because they feel more comfortable with it or because they might lose their job if they went away from it. The reason a company creates more stock is to generate more capital so that this can be utilized and more returns can be generated. It is commonly done as a follow on public offer. Typically the funds are used to retire high cost debts and fund future expansion. What stops the company from doing it?   Are Small investors cheated?   It's like you have joined a car pool with 4 people and you are beliving that you own 1/4th of the total seats ... so when most of them decide that we would be better of using Minivan with 4 more persons, you cannot complain that you now only own 1/8 of the total seats. Even before you were having just one seat, and even after you just have one seat ... overall it maybe better as the ride would be good ... :) "There are people (well, companies) who make money doing roughly what you describe, but not exactly. They're called ""market makers"". Their value for X% is somewhere on the scale of 1% (that is to say: a scale at which almost everything is ""volatile""), but they use leverage, shorting and hedging to complicate things to the point where it's nothing like a simple as making a 1% profit every time they trade. Their actions tend to reduce volatility and increase liquidity. The reason you can't do this is that you don't have enough capital to do what market makers do, and you don't receive any advantages that the exchange might offer to official market makers in return for them contracting to always make both buy bids and sell offers (at different prices, hence the ""bid-offer spread""). They have to be able to cover large short-term losses on individual stocks, but when the stock doesn't move too much they do make profits from the spread. The reason you can't just buy a lot of volatile stocks ""assuming I don't make too many poor choices"", is that the reason the stocks are volatile is that nobody knows which ones are the good choices and which ones are the poor choices. So if you buy volatile stocks then you will buy a bunch of losers, so what's your strategy for ensuring there aren't ""too many""? Supposing that you're going to hold 10 stocks, with 10% of your money in each, what do you do the first time all 10 of them fall the day after you bought them? Or maybe not all 10, but suppose 75% of your holdings give no impression that they're going to hit your target any time soon. Do you just sit tight and stop trading until one of them hits your X% target (in which case you start to look a little bit more like a long-term investor after all), or are you tempted to change your strategy as the months and years roll by? If you will eventually sell things at a loss to make cash available for new trades, then you cannot assess your strategy ""as if"" you always make an X% gain, since that isn't true. If you don't ever sell at a loss, then you'll inevitably sometimes have no cash to trade with through picking losers. The big practical question then is when that state of affairs persists, for how long, and whether it's in force when you want to spend the money on something other than investing. So sure, if you used a short-term time machine to know in advance which volatile stocks are the good ones today, then it would be more profitable to day-trade those than it would be to invest for the long term. Investing on the assumption that you'll only pick short-term winners is basically the same as assuming you have that time machine ;-) There are various strategies for analysing the market and trying to find ways to more modestly do what market makers do, which is to take profit from the inherent volatility of the market. The simple strategy you describe isn't complete and cannot be assessed since you don't say how to decide what to buy, but the selling strategy ""sell as soon as I've made X% but not otherwise"" can certainly be improved. If you're keen you can test a give strategy for yourself using historical share price data (or current share price data: run an imaginary account and see how you're doing in 12 months). When using historical data you have to be realistic about how you'd choose what stocks to buy each day, or else you're just cheating at solitaire. When using current data you have to beware that there might not be a major market slump in the next 12 months, in which case you won't know how your strategy performs under conditions that it inevitably will meet eventually if you run it for real. You also have to be sure in either case to factor in the transaction costs you'd be paying, and the fact that you're buying at the offer price and selling at the bid price, you can't trade at the headline mid-market price. Finally, you have to consider that to do pure technical analysis as an individual, you are in effect competing against a bank that's camped on top of the exchange to get fastest possible access to trade, it has a supercomputer and a team of whizz-kids, and it's trying to find and extract the same opportunities you are. This is not to say the plucky underdog can't do well, but there are systematic reasons not to just assume you will. So folks investing for their retirement generally prefer a low-risk strategy that plays the averages and settles for taking long-term trends." He said he's using MSCI World as a benchmark. MSCI World is not an exchange. The point is the same security listed in different places has different prices, so how do you describe the equity beta of the company to MSCI World if you have multiple and different return streams? This is a real problem to consider and you just dismiss it entirely. "Pay to play? You mean they pay for beefier data feeds that other firms don't need, sure they do. But everyone can trade on the US exchanges now (NYSE, NASDAQ, BATS, etc) which was not true 20 years ago when NYSE had the specialist monopoly, so yes the markets are more democratic than they've ever been.  Side note, the exchanges do directly profit from increased trading volume because they take a small % of every trade, so I'm not sure what you mean they don't directly profit from it.  Also I get the feeling you don't understand the scope of HFT activity, HFT peak profits were on the order of 7 billion during the highest volume time of the last decade (2005-2010). They are now around 1B. Compared to the trillions of dollars that change hands in the exchange per year, this is chump change, hardly a ""free money faucet"".  Also Katsayuma opened yet another dark pool that caters to high volume clients (your goldmans and merrils). The only difference in IEX is it got a free marketing campaign to entice clients. Seriously, IEX is nothing more than the existing fixed cross dark pools, which btw screws over retail investors more than the lit exchanges like NASDAQ.   Katsayuma got steamrolled in his executions because he couldn't keep up with the time and then hit the lottery jackpot by getting Michael Lewis to paint him as a ""hero"", honestly I'm confounded at how lucky that dude got.  BTW broker dealers get preferential treatment in IEX, meaning they get to cut in front of the line in front of retail investors. Why are you so opinionated about this, did you make a few bad trades on eTrade and need a scapegoat?" The suffix represents the stock exchange the stock is traded on. N represents the New York Stock Exchange and O represents the Nasdaq. Sometimes a stock can be listed on more than one exchange so the suffix will give you an indication of which exchange the stock is on. For example the Australian company BHP Billiton Ltd is listed on multiple exchanges so is given a different suffix for the different exchanges (especially when the code is the same for each exchange). Below are a few examples of BHP: Serious answer: If 7 banks owned the vast majority of houses for sale -- that is, on their balance sheet, at the peak of the housing bubble -- there would be. These 7 LCD companies produced the majority of LCDs globally. Real estate is far more decentralized, and in many times the bank merely provided financing for a third-party sale (from the builder, from any one of a hundred or so real estate companies, etc).  (But I am assuming you probably weren't looking for a factual answer, anyway.) First and foremost you need to be aware of what you are comparing. In this case, HSBC as traded on the NYSE exchange is not common shares, but an ADR (American Depository Receipt) with a 5:1 ratio from the actual shares. So for most intents and purposes owning one ADR is like owning five common shares. But for special events like dividends, there may be other considerations, such as the depository bank (the institution that created the ADR) may take a percentage. Further, given that some people, accounts or institutions may be required to invest in a given country or not, there may be some permanent price dislocation between the shares and the ADR, which can further lead to discrepancies which are then highlighted by the seeming difference in dividends. You must understand that: So, if you -- the prospective buyer -- are in Waukegan, do you take the train all the way to New York City just to buy 100 shares of stock?  No.  That would be absurdly expensive.  So, you hire an agent in NYC who will broker a deal for you in the exchange. Fast forward 100 years, to the time when instant communications is available.  Why do we now still need brokerages, when the Exchanges could set up web sites and let you do the trading? The answer is that the Exchanges don't want to have to develop the accounting systems to manage the transactions of hundreds of thousands of small traders, when existing brokerage firms already have those computerized processes in place and are opening their own web sites. Thus, in 2017 we have brokerage firms because of history. "A huge amount of money in all financial markets is from institutional investors, such as mutual funds, government pension plans, sovereign wealth funds, etc.  For various reasons these funds do all of their trading at the end of the day.  They care primarily that their end-of-day balances are in line with their targets and are easy to audit and far less about ""timing the market"" for the best possible trades. So, if you're looking at a stock that is owned by many institutional investors -- such as a stock (like AAPL) that makes up a significant portion of an index that many funds track -- there will be a huge amount of activity at this time relative to stocks that are less popular among institutions. Even just in its introduction this paper (PDF) gives a fair overview of other reasons why there's a lot of trading at end-of-day in general. (In fact, because of all this closing activity and the reliance on end-of-day prices as signposts for financial calculations, the end-of-day has for decades been the single most fraud-ridden time of the trading day.  Electronic trading has done away with a lot of the straight-up thievery that floor traders and brokers used to get away with at the expense of the public, but it still exists.  See, for example, any explanation of the term banging the close, or the penalties against 6 banks just last month for manipulating the FX market at the close.)"