Share Dealing

Share dealing. The world's stockmarkets are the biggest second-hand business you will ever come across! Stockmarkets exist to allow companies to raise capital through the issue of new shares to fund business investment.

The success of such fund raising activities depends very much on the liquidity of the market: that is, how easily the players in the market find it to put up the money for the company's equity or shares.

The only important measure of liquidity is the second-hand market - how easy is it to sell shares once you have bought them. Nobody really wants to be stuck without the ability to realize their cash once more.

There has been a plethora of new issues - companies coming to the stockmarket in the last two decades. The biggest companies coming to the market have been the privatisation issues carried out by the Conservative government but even taking these issues into consideration, the buying and selling of "second-hand" shares is a much larger part of day-to-day market activity.

You may buy shares in the hope of receiving a regular income from them in the form of dividend payments or you may be hoping that the share price will rise in value to give you some capital gain . Most people invest in shares or equities looking for a mixture of the two, some income and some capital gain.

For free share prices and world indices, see our Stockmarket service.

Last Updated: April 2008 © Moneyextra.com

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