Who are Stock Market Players?

Want to know about Stock Market Players? Investment Banks, Stockbrokers, and Investors are stock market players. All players play their roles differently in trading. There are many regular participants in stock market trading.

Stock market operators range from small investors to large investors. Large insurance companies, index funds, mutual funds, retail investors, investor groups, institutional investors (e.g., pension funds, and various financial institutions are major participants in the stock market.
Stock market participants can be based anywhere in the world. But let’s not get into all of them. Let us begin with major market players only such as Investment Banks.

Investment Banks

Investment banks manage the IPO’s (Initial Public Offerings) of a company that takes place when a company first decides to become a publicly-traded company by offering shares of that company to the public.

Let’s take the example of working of an IPO’s. There’s a company that wishes to become a publicly-traded company by offering its share to the general public to catch up with an investment bank to act as the “Underwriter” of the company’s initial stock offered. So, the Investment banks do the research about the company’s total worth or value and also look into the percentage of ownership the company desired to waive in shares form.

Investment banks then manage the initial issuing of shares for a fee in the market, while with a certain promise to determine a minimum price per share of the company. Therefore, it becomes the duty of the investment banks to sell all offered stocks to be sold and that too at the highest price possible.

Shares issued in IPOs are most likely to be bought by large institutional companies such as Mutual Funds or Pension Funds companies.

IPOs issue in the market is known as the primary or initial market. Once a stock has been offered in the IPOs market, all trading of the stocks afterward happens in the stock exchange only also known as the secondary market. Don’t go to the word “Secondary Market” because it is more kind of misleading since it is a place where massive trading of stocks takes place in a day.

Stockbrokers

Stockbrokers may or may not be acting as financial advisors, buy and sell stocks for clients. They can be individual retail investors or institutional investors.

Other Players – Equity research analysts

Other players such as equity research analysts, who are employed by brokerage firms, Mutual Funds, Investment banks who analyze the shares of publicly-traded companies, and tries to forecast the company’s share whether it will see a rise or drop in price.

These Fund Managers including, Hedge, Mutual Funds, and Exchange-traded Fund (ETF)- all play a major role and are considered as important market participants because they buy and sell stocks in large no. of units. It is also a saying that if a reputed mutual fund decides to invest in bulk in particular stock only, then they have the potential to drive the price of the stocks noticeably higher just by its demand alone.