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DefinitionThe term Financial markets can be a cause of much confusion. Financial markets could mean: 1. organisations that facilitate the trade in financial products. i.e. Stock exchanges facilitate the trade in stocks, bonds and warrants. 2. the coming together of buyers and sellers to trade financial products. i.e. stocks and shares are traded between buyers and sellers in a number of ways including: the use of stock exchanges; directly between buyers and sellers etc. In academia, students of finance will use both meanings but students of economics will only use the second meaning. Financial markets can be domestic or they can be international. Types of financial marketsThe financial markets can be divided into different subtypes:
The capital markets consist of primary markets and secondary markets. Newly formed (issued) securities are bought or sold in primary markets. Secondary markets allow investors to sell securities that they hold or buy existing securities. Raising capitalTo understand financial markets, let us look at what they are used for, i.e. what is their purpose? Without financial markets, borrowers would have difficulty finding lenders themselves. Intermediaries such as banks help in this process. Banks take deposits from those who have money to save. They can then lend money from this pool of deposited money to those who seek to borrow. Banks popularly lend money in the form of loans and mortgages. More complex transactions than a simple bank deposit require markets where lenders and their agents can meet borrowers and their agents, and where existing borrowing or lending commitments can be sold on to other parties. A good example of a financial market is a stock exchange. A company can raise money by selling shares to investors and its existing shares can be bought or sold. The following table illustrates where financial markets fit in the relationship between lenders and borrowers:
LendersIndividuals do not think of themselves as lenders but they lend to other parties in many ways. Lending activities may be:
Companies tend to be borrowers of capital. When companies have surplus cash that is not needed for a short period of time, they may seek to make money from their cash surplus by lending it via short term markets called money markets. There are a few companies that have very strong cash flows. These companies tend to be lenders rather than borrowers. Such companies may decide to return cash to lenders (e.g. via a share buyback.) Alternatively, they may seek to make more money on their cash by lending it (e.g. investing in bonds and stocks.) BorrowersIndividuals borrow money via bankers loans for short term needs or longer term mortgages to help finance a house purchase. Companies borrow money to aid short term or long term cash flows. They also borrow to fund modernisation or future business expansion. Governments often find their spending requirements exceed their tax revenues. To make up this difference, they need to borrow. Governments also borrow on behalf of nationalised industries, municipalities, local authorities and other public sector bodies. In the UK, the total borrowing requirement is often referred to as the public sector borrowing requirement (PSBR). Governments borrow by issuing bonds. In the UK, the government also borrows from individuals by offering bank accounts and Premium Bonds. Government debt seems to be permanent. Indeed the debt seemingly expands rather than being paid off. One strategy used by governments to reduce the value of the debt is to influence inflation. Municipalities and local authorities may borrow in their own name as well as receiving funding from national governments. In the UK, this would cover an authority like Hampshire County Council. Public Corporations typically include nationalised industries. These may include the postal services, railway companies and utility companies. Many borrowers have difficulty raising money locally. They need to borrow internationally with the aid of Foreign exchange markets. Derivative productsDuring the 1980s and 1990s, a major growth sector in financial markets is the trade in so called derivative products, or derivatives for short. In the financial markets, stock prices, bond prices, currency rates, interest rates and dividends go up and down, creating risk. Derivative products are financial products which are used to control risk or paradoxically exploit risk. Currency marketsSeemingly, the most obvious buyers and sellers of foreign exchange are importers/exporters. While this may have been true in the distant past, whereby importers/exporters created the initial demand for currency markets, importers and exporters now represent only 1/32 of foreign exchange dealing, according to BIS.[1] The picture of foreign currency transactions today shows:
Analysis of financial marketsMuch effort has gone into the study of financial markets and how prices vary with time. Charles Dow, one of the founders of Dow Jones & Company and The Wall Street Journal, enunciated a set of ideas on the subject which are now called Dow Theory. This is the basis of the so-called technical analysis method of attempting to predict future changes. One of the tenets of "technical analysis" is that market trends give an indication of the future, at least in the short term. The claims of the technical analysts are disputed by many academics, who claim that the evidence points rather to the random walk hypothesis, which states that the next change is not correlated to the last change. The scale of changes in price over some unit of time is called the volatility. It was discovered by Benoît Mandelbrot that changes in prices do not follow a Gaussian distribution, but are rather modeled better by Lévy stable distributions. The scale of change, or volatiliy, depends on the length of the time unit to a power a bit more than 1/2. Large changes up or down are more likely that what one would calculate using a Gaussian distribution with an estimated standard deviation. Financial markets in popular culture
Only negative stories about financial markets tend to make the news. The general perception, for those not involved in the world of financial markets is of a place full of crooks and con artists. Big stories like the Enron scandal serve to enhance this view. Stories that make the headlines involve the incompetent, the lucky and the downright skillful. The Barings scandal is a classic story of incompetence mixed with greed leading to dire consequences. Another story of note is that of Black Wednesday, when sterling came under attack from hedge fund speculators. This led to major problems for the United Kingdom and had a serious impact on its course in Europe. A commonly recurring event is the stock market bubble, whereby market prices rise to dizzying heights in a so called exaggerated bull market. This is not a new phenomenon; indeed the story of Tulip mania in the Netherlands in the 17th century illustrates an early recorded example. Financial markets are merely tools. Like all tools they have both beneficial and harmful uses. Overall, financial markets are used by honest people. Otherwise, people would turn away from them en masse. As in other walks of life, the financial markets have their fair share of rogue elements. Financial markets slang
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de:Finanzmarkt et:Finantsturg es:Mercado financiero fr:Marché financier nl:Vermogensmarkt ja:金融市場 pl:Rynek finansowy uk:Фінансові ринки zh:金融市场
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