Essentially a market is a place which introduces a buyer to a seller. In the case of stocks the buyer and seller are dealing in small ownership portions of companies or shares.
What is the function of Stock Markets? Stock markets perform the following functions:
Connecting those who seek money with those who can provide it.
Create an auction mechanism in which prices can be decided for investments.
Distributing the future risk of investments across many millions of individuals.
Providing the claim tickets upon which future wealth can be staked.
Connecting financial instutions together to create money.
Overtime Stock Markets have become the very symbol of commerce in the modern world.
They are truly unique in their scope and in the complexity of the number of transactions they handle each day.
The economy of the world relies on the stock exchanges to facilitate even trade in the stocks of companies.
In our current era anyone can easily hook themselves up the most popular stock exchanges just by opening an online brokerage account. Direct interaction with the selling floor of the exchanges gives the modern investor more control than any other generation.