Equity Issuance and TradingLocked: included in All Access

How shares are issued and traded: primary and secondary markets, exchange, off-exchange and over-the-counter trading, liquidity measures such as float and average daily volume, and the types of equity indexes.

1. 1. Primary markets, secondary markets and how trades are arrangedIssuers sell new securities in the primary market and investors trade them in secondary markets, whose liquidity lowers issuers' cost of capital; secondary trading is organised as call or continuous sessions in quote-driven, order-driven or brokered markets.Locked: included in All Access15 min
2. 2. Routes to public equity: IPOs, SPACs, direct listings and follow-onsCompanies reach the public equity market through an IPO, a SPAC, a direct listing or a back door listing, and later sell more shares in follow-on offerings that are dilutive when the shares are new and non-dilutive when existing owners sell.Locked: included in All Access13 min
3. 3. Why IPOs are underpriced, and what secondary markets doIPO underpricing persists because underwriters, favoured investors and even managers gain from it, while secondary markets, active in rising and falling markets alike, give investors liquidity and price discovery and give firms feedback that drives financing, buyback and pay decisions.Locked: included in All Access12 min
4. 4. Exchange trading: the order book, the bid-ask spread and VWAPOn an exchange, member broker-dealers bring orders to a central matching system; trading costs are explicit fees plus implicit costs such as the bid-ask spread, which you read from the limit order book alongside the mid-market price, fill prices and VWAP.Locked: included in All Access14 min
5. 5. Off-exchange and over-the-counter equity tradingVery large, very small or illiquid trades often execute off-exchange to limit implicit costs such as market impact, while OTC equity trading runs through a network of dealer market makers that offers reliable execution but less transparency.Locked: included in All Access11 min
6. 6. Measuring liquidity: float, average daily volume and turnoverA share's liquidity is judged by its trading costs, by how much of its tradable float changes hands each day, and by the depth, breadth and resiliency of its order book.Locked: included in All Access12 min
7. 7. Types of equity indexesEquity indexes come as broad market, multi-market, sector and style indexes; each slices the stock market a different way, and the slicing rules differ between providers.Locked: included in All Access11 min
8. 8. Composite, theme, ESG and factor equity indexesMost broad equity indexes are float-adjusted cap-weighted and split by size from a composite; narrower sector, theme, ESG, equal-weighted and factor indexes answer the biases of cap weighting and serve as benchmarks and the basis of index products, including multi-market products that carry currency risk.Locked: included in All Access12 min