Guide to Financial Markets

Guide to Financial Markets brings the reader up to date with the latest developments in financial instruments and provides a clear and incisive guide to this increasingly complex world. Financial markets have been around ever since people settled down to growing crops and trading them with each other. They take many different forms and operate in many different ways. But all of them, whether highly organised, like the New York Stock Exchange, or highly informal, like money-changers in Africa, serve the same basic functions, which range from providing a way of setting prices and valuing assets, through raising capital or investing it, to managing exposure to risk.

Introduction:

The word “market” usually conjures up an image of the bustling, paper-strewn floor of the New York Stock Exchange or of traders motioning frantically in the futures pits of Chicago. But formal exchanges such as these are only one aspect of the financial markets, and far from the most important one. There were financial markets long before there were exchanges and, in fact, long before there was organised trading of any sort.

Financial markets have been around ever since mankind settled down to growing crops and trading them with others. After a bad harvest, those early farmers would have needed to obtain seed for the next season’s planting, and perhaps to get food to see their families through. Both of these transactions would have required them to obtain credit from others with seed or food to spare. After a good harvest, the farmers would have had to decide whether to trade away their surplus immediately or to store it, a choice that any 20th-century commodities trader would find familiar. The amount of fish those early farmers could obtain for a basket of cassava would have varied day by day, depending upon the catch, the harvest and the weather; in short, their exchange rates were volatile.

The independent decisions of all of those farmers constituted a basic financial market, and that market fulfilled many of the same purposes as financial markets do today.

Contents:

• Why markets matter
• Foreign-exchange markets
• Money markets
• Bond markets
• Securitisation
• International fixed-income markets
• Equity markets
• Commodities and futures markets
• Options and derivatives markets

Guide to Financial Markets By Marc Levinson pdf