Business Organizations for Paralegals, 7th Edition by Bouchoux Deborah E

Author:Bouchoux, Deborah E.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wolters Kluwer Law & Business
Published: 2015-07-28T04:00:00+00:00

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Stock Market Trivia

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♦ The Philadelphia Stock Exchange, established in 1790, was the first exchange in the United States. It is now a part of NASDAQ.

♦ The tradition of pricing stocks in fractions with 8 or 16 as the denominator derived from Spanish trading in the 1500s when Spanish silver could be cut into “pieces of eight” and gold doubloons could be cut into 16 pieces. The NYSE and the other exchanges began trading in decimals in January 2001, ending the practice of trading in fractions used for more than 200 years.

♦ Originally, a Chinese gong was used to signal the beginning and ending of the trading each day on the floor of the NYSE. It is considered an honor to be invited to ring the opening or closing bell of the exchange, and many companies signal new product launches or an IPO with a bell ringing.

♦ The longest listed company on any U.S. exchange is Con Edison, listed on the NYSE in 1824.

♦ Not all large companies are publicly traded. Cargill, Mars, and Bechtel are all privately owned, and all have annual revenues of at least $30 billion.

♦ In 2004, the NYSE and NASDAQ fiercely competed to list Google, Inc., on their exchanges, with NASDAQ prevailing. Listings provide significant revenues. For example, NASDAQ earned about 12 percent of its revenues in 2013 from listing fees.

♦ The NYSE has the capacity to trade 10 billion shares per day.

♦ In October 2012, U.S. exchanges halted trading in the midst of Hurricane Sandy, the first time in more than 100 years that weather stopped activity on Wall Street for more than 24 hours.

♦ How do you decode a ticker symbol? Companies with one- to three-letter ticker symbols typically trade on the NYSE. Ticker symbols of four or five letters indicate that the company trades on NASDAQ. If a company that has a three-letter symbol moves its listing from NASDAQ to the NYSE, it may maintain its three-letter symbol. In recent years, there are exceptions to these general rules. For example, Facebook trades on NASDAQ as FB.

♦ Anheuser-Busch uses BUD as its ticker symbol, showcasing its premier product.

♦ General Electric Company is the only stock currently on the DJIA that was also included in the original 12 Dow stocks in 1896.

♦ The first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, Muriel Siebert, died in 2013. She purchased the seat in 1967 and was the only woman admitted to membership for nearly a decade. As she commented, “For ten years, it was 1,365 men and me.”

♦ In 2014, the SEC ordered hedge-fund trader Matthew Martoma of SAC Capital Advisors to pay a civil fine of $9.4 million. Mr. Martoma was also sentenced to nine years in prison, one of the stiffest sentences handed down for insider trading.

♦ In 2013, the SEC brought 686 enforcement actions and recovered a record $3.4 billion.

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