Syndicate
The New York Secondary Stock Exchange Market
Many investors, when talking about the American stock exchange (AMEX), they call it the curb exchange because at its beginnings it was composed by a group of informal stock exchange agents and by merchants that made their businesses on the sidewalk in front of the New York stock exchange, as by the windows and portals of near by buildings.
At the end of the nineties of the XIX Century, the American stock exchange was already organized and moved into their building. At the end of the fifties, the AMEX changed into its actual headquarters that is located behind the Trinity Church, at a few blocks from the New York stock exchange.
Although the AMEX has been merged recently with the NASDAQ, they still use their floor for contracting. The requisites of the AMEX for admitting to quotation securities of a company aren’t as strict as those of the NYSE in what assets; benefits and number of security holders are concerned.
The AMEX has been traditionally the place for contracting securities of new and small companies as also of those companies of natural resources. And when a company would increase its assets, would present trustworthy accounts of sales and profits and has won a greater notoriety, and seeing that they fulfilled the requisites demanded by the NYSE, they would immediately passes to form part of it.
The reasons for being part of the NYSE has much to do with the increasing of notoriety and of liquidity that many investors and directors of societies believe they can acquire by the fact of quoting in the NYSE.
However, if you read carefully the names of the societies that are quoted in the AMEX, you can verify that among them exist a certain number of known companies that have a respectable dimension. For this reason, many companies keep on being quoted at the AMEX through 40 or 50 years; the idea of changing the stock exchange market doesn’t seem an attractive to all the managing members of the different companies.
The mechanical process for executing the orders that the AMEX follows is practically the same as the one used by the NYSE. The specialized companies, the assistant agents of the stock exchange market, the collegiate operators and the operations personnel have the same functions and a similar importance than those at the NYSE.
However, there are some important differences between these two markets. In first place, the volume of operations of the AMEX is much lesser than those at the NYSE; this is due that big investors consider that many of the securities quoted at the AMEX don’t respond to their investment criterion. Traditionally the AMEX has been and keeps on being, the place in which small investors invest their money.
In second place, the prices of the securities quoted at the AMEX tend to be lower and more volatile than those securities traded at the NYSE.
Many companies that are quoted in the AMEX are small and, therefore, more sensible to the sudden changes of the economy and to the competence.
In spite of all, the AMEX has demonstrated to have an active character when developing and promoting commercially new investment products such as, for example, the options. It was the AMEX the first to develop in mew York the negotiation of options.
The Regional Stock Exchange Markets
The regional stock exchange markets were created to attend the needs of counting with contracting places in which local companies could have their securities quoted. These companies can inscribe in more than one stock exchange market always that they fulfill the requirements of admission for each one of them. The double inscription is usual at the regional stock exchange markets, where the operations are generally done at the actual prices of the NYSE and the AMEX, which makes that many securities have in fact a national quotation.