Even today, there are many people who do not have idea on the stock markets and investments through these, hence I chose this subject today to explain you.

Stock Markets or Stock Exchanges deal with the stocks or shares of a listed company. Listed company means the company which got its shares listed in the exchanges for public transactions. Stock exchanges facilitate the buying and selling transactions of the shares.

Initial Public Offer: Any company which wants its shares to be listed in the exchanges should apply for the Initial Public Offer(IPO)  to SEBI (Securities Exchanges Board of India).  After the green signal received from SEBI, the company offers shares through IPO to the public. The IPO, generally is open for three to four days and during this period the applications from the investors are received through various brokerages and collecting points.  On processing the applications, after a few days the investors will receive the intimation of allotment of shares or refund of money.  On a particular day these shares are listed in the exchanges, from that day the company gets itself will be a listed company. IPO is also called as Primary Market.

Secondary Market: Secondary market is nothing but the selling and buying transactions of the shares of the companies which are already listed in the exchanges. Secondary market is an index to the companies, where the investors buy the shares in this market, based on the performance of the company from time to time.  So every listed company is responsible for its shareholders and also SEBI, the authority for the stock markets, closely watch every company's transactions and see that investors are not bankrupted or cheated by the bad managements of these corporates.

Demat Account: We, so far, learnt about primary market and secondary market.  Both in these markets shares are bought and sold. Some years back almost all the shares of the companies were in physical format and nowadays through the latest technology, these shares can be converted to electronic form, which is called Demat account.  The introduction of Demat account made the share market transactions very easy and also transparant.

Delivery: If you buy share and keep them for some time till they good return to you, it is called delivery of the shares. This is mostly done by the investors or positional traders.  It is the safest method of investing in the markets.

Intraday: It is also called day trading, in which the shares are not taken for delivery but on the same day, buying and selling transactions happen.  This is a risky process and you may or may not get profit through this.

Futures and Options: This segment is called F&O shortly, and is a very attractive for the traders where the returns are very high but risk is also so. While trading in the F&O, one must be very careful and also should not trade without experience, as there is every chance of losing entire capital with only one transaction.

Let us learn some more areas of the Stock Markets in the coming days.  Hope this article is informative and useful for the new entrants of the stock markets. Goodluck!