Whois & Analysis for icicidirect.com

In India, shares and securities are held electronically in a dematerialized (or "Demat") account, instead of the investor taking physical possession of certificates.

A Demat account.

A mutual fund is a professionally managed investment fund that pools money from many investors to purchase securities.

While there is no legal definition of the term "mutual fund", it is most commonly applied to collective investment vehicles that are regulated and sold to the general public on a daily basis.

They are sometimes referred to as "investment companies" or "registered investment companies".

Hedge funds are not mutual funds; they cannot be sold to the general public and are subject to different government regulations.

Initial public offering (IPO) or stock market launch is a type of public offering in which shares of a company usually are sold to institutional investors that in turn, sell to the general public, on a securities exchange, for the first time.

Through this process, a privately held company transforms into a public company.

Initial public offerings are mostly used by companies to raise the expansion of capital, possibly to monetize the investments of early private investors, and to become publicly traded enterprises.

A company selling shares is never required to repay the capital to its public investors.

After the IPO, when shares trade freely in the open market, money passes between public investors.

Although IPO offers many advantages, there are also significant disadvantages, chief among these are the costs associated with the process and the requirement to disclose certain information that could prove helpful to competitors.

The IPO process is colloquially known as going public.

The Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) is an Indian stock exchange located at Dalal Street, Kala Ghoda, Mumbai (formerly Bombay), Maharashtra, India.

Established in 1875, the BSE is Asia’s first stock exchange.

It claims to be the world's fastest stock exchange, with a median trade speed of 6 microseconds.

The BSE is the world's 11th largest stock exchange with an overall market capitalization of $1.43 Trillion as of March, 2016.

More than 5500 companies are publicly listed on the BSE.

A stock market, equity market or share market is the aggregation of buyers and sellers (a loose network of economic transactions, not a physical facility or discrete entity) of stocks (also called shares), which represent ownership claims on businesses; these may include securities listed on a public stock exchange as well as those only traded privately.

Examples of the latter include shares of private companies which are sold to investors through equity crowdfunding platforms.

Stock exchanges list shares of common equity as well as other security types, e.g. corporate bonds and convertible bonds.