Understanding Financial Markets with Riddhi Siddhi Multi Services
As firms grow, their need for capital can expand
dramatically. At some point, the firm may find that “cutting out the
middle-man” and raising funds directly from investors is advantageous. At this
point, it is ready to sell new financial assets, such as shares of stock, to
the public. The first time the firm sells shares to the general public is
called the initial public offering, or IPO. The corporation, which until now
was privately owned, is said to “go public.” The sale of the securities is
usually managed by a group of investment banks such. Investors who buy shares
are contributing funds that will be used to pay for the firm’s investments in
real assets. In return, they become part-owners of the firm and share in the future
success of the enterprise. As per Riddhi Siddhi Multi Services experts, anyone
who followed the market for Internet IPOs in 1999 knows that these expectations
for future success can be on the optimistic side (to put it mildly).
An IPO is not the only occasion on which newly issued stock
is sold to the public. Established firms also issue new shares from time to
time. For example, suppose General Motors needs to raise funds to renovate an
auto plant. It might hire an investment banking firm to sell $500 million of GM
stock to investors. Some of this stock may be bought by individuals; the
remainder will be bought by financial institutions such as pension funds and
insurance companies. A new issue of securities increases both the amount of
cash held by the company and the amount of stocks or bonds held by the public.
Such an issue is known as a primary issue and it is sold in the primary market.
But in addition to helping companies raise new cash, financial markets also
allow investors to trade stocks or bonds between themselves. You can team up
with Riddhi Siddhi Multi Services to understand this process better.
Some financial assets have no secondary market. For example,
when a small company borrows money from the bank, it gives the bank an IOU
promising to repay the money with interest. The bank will keep the IOU and will
not sell it to another bank. Other financial assets are regularly traded.
Thus
when a large public company raises cash by selling new shares to investors, it
knows that many of these investors will subsequently decide to sell their
shares to others.
While shares of stock may be traded either on exchanges or
over-the-counter, almost all corporate debt is traded over-the-counter, if it
is traded at all.
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