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What is the Stock Market?

The stock market refers to public markets that exist for issuing, buying, and selling stocks that trade on a stock exchange or over-the-counter. Stocks, also known as equities, represent fractional ownership in a company, and the stock market is a place where investors can buy and sell ownership of such investible assets. An efficiently functioning stock market is considered critical to economic development, as it gives companies the ability to quickly access capital from the public.

 

Purposes of the Stock Market – Capital and Investment Income

The stock market serves two very important purposes. The first is to provide capital to companies that they can use to fund and expand their businesses. If a company issues one million shares of stock that initially sell for $10 a share, then that provides the company with $10 million of capital that it can use to grow its business (minus whatever fees the company pays for an investment bank to manage the stock offering). By offering stock shares instead of borrowing the capital needed for expansion, the company avoids incurring debt and paying interest charges on that debt.

The secondary purpose the stock market serves is to give investors – those who purchase stocks – the opportunity to share in the profits of publicly-traded companies. Investors can profit from stock buying in one of two ways. 

Some stocks pay regular dividends (a given amount of money per share of stock someone owns). The other way investors can profit from buying stocks is by selling their stock for a profit if the stock price increases from their purchase price. 

For example, if an investor buys shares of a company’s stock at $10 a share and the price of the stock subsequently rises to $15 a share, the investor can then realize a 50% profit on their investment by selling their shares. 

 

History of Stock Trading

Although stock trading dates back as far as the mid-1500s in Antwerp, modern stock trading is generally recognized as starting with the trading of shares in the East India Company in London.

 

The Early Days of Investment Trading

Throughout the 1600s, British, French, and Dutch governments provided charters to a number of companies that included East India in the name. All goods brought back from the East were transported by sea, involving risky trips often threatened by severe storms and pirates. 

To mitigate these risks, ship owners regularly sought out investors to proffer financing collateral for a voyage. In return, investors received a portion of the monetary returns realized if the ship made it back successfully, loaded with goods for sale. These are the earliest examples of limited liability companies (LLCs), and many held together only long enough for one voyage.

 

The East India Company

The formation of the East India Company in London eventually led to a new investment model, with importing companies offering stocks that essentially represented a fractional ownership interest in the company, and that therefore offered investors investment returns on proceeds from all the voyages a company funded, instead of just on a single trip. 

The new business model made it possible for companies to ask for larger investments per share, enabling them to easily increase the size of their shipping fleets. Investing in such companies, which were often protected from competition by royally-issued charters, became very popular due to the fact that investors could potentially realize massive profits on their investments.

 

The First Shares and the First Exchange

Company shares were issued on paper, enabling investors to trade shares back and forth with other investors, but regulated exchanges did not exist until the formation of the London Stock Exchange (LSE) in 1773. Although a significant amount of financial turmoil followed the immediate establishment of the LSE, exchange trading overall managed to survive and grow throughout the 1800s.

 

The Beginnings of the New York Stock Exchange

Enter the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), established in 1792. Though not the first on U.S. soil – that honor goes to the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PSE) – the NYSE rapidly grew to become the dominant stock exchange in the United States, and eventually in the world. 

The NYSE occupied a physically strategic position, located among some of the country’s largest banks and companies, not to mention being situated in a major shipping port. 

The exchange established listing requirements for shares, and rather hefty fees initially, enabling it to quickly become a wealthy institution itself.

 

Modern Stock Trading – The Changing Face of Global Exchanges

Domestically, the NYSE saw meager competition for more than two centuries, and its growth was primarily fueled by an ever-growing American economy. The LSE continued to dominate the European market for stock trading, but the NYSE became home to a continually expanding number of large companies. 

Other major countries, such as France and Germany, eventually developed their own stock exchanges, though these were often viewed primarily as stepping stones for companies on their way to listing with the LSE or NYSE.

The late 20th century saw the expansion of stock trading into many other exchanges, including the NASDAQ, which became a favorite home of burgeoning technology companies and gained increased importance during the technology sector boom of the 1980s and 1990s. 

The NASDAQ emerged as the first exchange operating between a web of computers that electronically executed trades. Electronic trading made the entire process of trading more time-efficient and cost-efficient. In addition to the rise of the NASDAQ, the NYSE faced increasing competition from stock exchanges in Australia and Hong Kong, the financial center of Asia.

The NYSE eventually merged with Euronext, which was formed in 2000 through the merger of the Brussels, Amsterdam, and Paris exchanges. The NYSE/Euronext merger in 2007 established the first trans-Atlantic exchange.

 

 How Stocks are Traded – Exchanges and OTC

Most stocks are traded on exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) or the NASDAQ. Stock exchanges essentially provide the marketplace to facilitate the buying and selling of stocks among investors. Stock exchanges are regulated by government agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the United States, that oversee the market in order to protect investors from financial fraud and to keep the exchange market functioning smoothly.

Although the vast majority of stocks are traded on exchanges, some stocks are traded over-the-counter (OTC), where buyers and sellers of stocks commonly trade through a dealer, or “market maker”, who specifically deals with the stock. OTC stocks are stocks that do not meet the minimum price or other requirements for being listed on exchanges.

OTC stocks are not subject to the same public reporting regulations as stocks listed on exchanges, so it is not as easy for investors to obtain reliable information on the companies issuing such stocks. Stocks in the OTC market are typically much more thinly traded than exchange-traded stocks, which means that investors often must deal with large spreads between bid and ask prices for an OTC stock. In contrast, exchange-traded stocks are much more liquid, with relatively small bid-ask spreads.

Stock Market Players – Investment Banks, Stockbrokers, and Investors

There are a number of regular participants in stock market trading.

Investment banks handle the initial public offering (IPO) of stock that occurs when a company first decides to become a publicly-traded company by offering stock shares.

Here’s an example of how an IPO works. A company that wishes to go public and offer shares approaches an investment bank to act as the “underwriter” of the company’s initial stock offering.

 The investment bank, after researching the company’s total value and taking into consideration what percentage of ownership the company wishes to relinquish in the form of stock shares, handles the initial issuing of shares in the market in return for a fee, while guaranteeing the company a determined minimum price per share. It is therefore in the best interests of the investment bank to see that all the shares offered are sold and at the highest possible price.

Shares offered in IPOs are most commonly purchased by large institutional investors such as pension funds or mutual fund companies.

 

Stock Market Indexes

The overall performance of the stock market is usually tracked and reflected in the performance of various stock market indexes. Stock indexes are composed of a selection of stocks that is designed to reflect how stocks are performing overall. Stock market indexes themselves are traded in the form of options and futures contracts, which are also traded on regulated exchanges.

Among the key stock market indexes are the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index (S&P 500), the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 Index (FTSE 100), the Nikkei 225 Index, the NASDAQ Composite Index, and the Hang Seng Index.

From debilitating online attacks on major corporate websites to data breaches designed to influence elections, cybercrime has dominated the headlines in 2016. Threats and attacks are becoming more frequent, more sophisticated, and more effective every day.

They are also becoming more profitable for the cybercriminals. Today’s global cybercrime is big business. Attacks currently account for more than $400 billion in financial losses annually.

 

Cybercrime business

In fact, cybercrime is now the second fastest growing global economic sector and is on track to be the most lucrative soon. From the perspective of organizations that are the victims, cybercrime results in huge losses. Experts predict that annual cybercrime costs will grow from $3 trillion in 2015 to $6 trillion annually by 2021.

 

Most common online fraud attacks

There are two main ways cybercriminals are able to gather customer data. First, they can redirect customers to fraudulent bank sites. Second, they can inject malware into customers’ systems which changes the behavior of the legitimate site to facilitate the cybercrime.

 

Online Fraud Prevention, Phishing and Malware Detection

In the first type of attack, fraudsters will clone a legitimate bank site and create a fake one that directs customer traffic to the malicious servers. This is done through:

Phishing schemes, where customers open up a malicious email that appears to be from a bank or business and click a link that directs them to a cloned impostor site. Typically, such emails mimic the design (logo, signature, etc.) used by the bank (or store) to communicate with you regularly.

Pharming attacks that trick the domain name server to redirect a user (who has typed in the correct address) to the impostor site. Once the customer reaches the cloned site, cybercriminals can either steal from them, copy their login credentials for future theft, or use them as “mules” to unwittingly transfer money or data from the bank to the malicious servers.

Other types of cybercrime, such as man-in-the-browser (MITB) attacks, infect a customer’ device and are triggered when a particular site is visited through the browser. These attacks inject malware code designed to compromise interactions on the legitimate bank sites.

 

Conclusion

As malicious hackers become increasingly savvy and greedy, it’s more important than ever for banks and other organizations to reassure customers that their data and assets are safe in order to protect their customers and avoid a bad reputation.

That´s why buguroo has developed a next generation online fraud solution. bugFraud provides a new level of transaction security, protecting organizations and their online customers from all types of attacks and fraudulent schemes.

Unlike current signature-based solutions, bugFraud relies on signature-less technology generating custom countermeasures in real time, using a proprietary pattern similarity-based mechanism that can detect new malware campaigns that interact with the victim’s browser like MITB threats, regardless of whether or not the interaction matches a known malware signature.

As the internet continues to expand into every aspect of society, online scams are only growing in sophistication.

From phishing schemes to fake ticket vendors, online scams prey on different facets that drive us, like sympathy, fear, and greed.

What online scams all have in common is that they prey on their audience’s navet and ignorance.

Some of the most elaborate scams are circulating the corners of the internet right now, from the front page of YouTube to right in your inbox.

 

Here are some of the most sophisticated online scams on the internet.

• Phishing has major consequences for the victims.

One of the most widespread online scams is phishing. In 2016, depending who you ask, phishing at most derailed Hillary Clinton’s presidential bid, and at the least, revealed her campaign manager’s delightful recipe for creamy risotto.

Phishing, when successful, tricks the user into unwittingly handing over their passwords to the scammer, often through professional-looking emails purporting to be from trustworthy businesses. The endgame is generally acquisition of personal information, like credit card and social security numbers.

According to the Anti-Phishing Working Group, nearly 100,000 attempts of phishing are reported each month worldwide.

Recently, phishing has been weaponized to varying degrees of sophistication with a key technique: impersonation.

The trick was enough to convince one employee at Gimlet Media, which runs the everything-internet podcast Reply All, to open an email from his coworker. Except the sender was not his coworker, but a hacker attempting a work-sanctioned phishing test on the company’s employees.

Familiarity fraud is an online tactic people have to be especially wary of on social media, where friends pictures and handles are rife for imitation. Duplicate accounts fish for personal information under the guise of intimacy.

 

• The Nigerian prince scam is one of the oldest on the internet.

The Nigerian prince scam is one of the oldest scams on the internet.

The scam rose to prominence in the 1990s, and is referred to by the FBI as Nigerian Letter or 419 fraud.

The premise is simple: You get an email, and within the message, a Nigerian prince (or investor, or government official) offers you an opportunity for lucrative financial gain.

The catch? Pay a small portion of the amount up front, or hand over bank account information and other identifying information so that the transfer can be made. Of course, you lose that seed money, never receiving a dime in return.

According to a 2018 Wired article, the conspiracy has risen in sophistication, netting millions in scam money and minor celebrity status for the Nigerian email schemers who commit the fraud.

Its malware and phishing combined with clever social engineering and account takeovers, James Bettke, a counter-threat unit researcher at the security firm Secureworks, told Wired reporter Lily Hay Newman in 2018.

They are not very technically sophisticated, they can’t code, they don’t do a lot of automation, he added. But their strengths are social engineering and creating agile scams. They spend months sifting through inboxes. They’re quiet and methodical.

 

• Ticket fraud leads to consumers buying fake sports and music tickets.

Another popular online scam is ticket fraud, in which consumers are tricked into buying fake tickets for sporting events, concerts, and other events.

Scammers usually target high-profile events that are likely to sell out so they can take advantage of increased demand. Often, the tickets they send customers have forged bar codes or are duplicate copies of legitimate tickets. Other times, consumers won’t receive any ticket at all after they pay up.

More than 10% of millennials have been victims of ticket fraud, and the Better Business Bureau recommends customers take several precautions before buying tickets online.

 

4. Some people have been messaged by celebrity impersonators.

A variation on the phishing game is when online scammers masquerade as celebrities and influencers.

In January, YouTube star Philip DeFranco had to warn his 6 million-plus subscribers of one such scam.

“If you have gotten a message from me or any other creator on YouTube that looks something like this, that is very likely someone trying to scam you,” DeFranco said in a video posted to his channel.

 

The faux DeFranco slid into targets Youtube messages, promising gifts via the click of a hyperlink. The scammers real endgame: identity theft for financial gain through a classic online phishing scheme.

More than 150 YouTube users on the community page said they fell for the ploy.

“We’re aware and in the process of implementing additional measures to fight impersonation,” a YouTube employee wrote in response to complaints of scam. “In the meantime, we’ve removed accounts identified as spam.”

The company also said users could block any account spamming them and that the perpetrating channels can be reported through its reporting tool .

 

• Other times, people feel scammed by the real influencers.

It’s one thing to be duped by an imaginary celebrity. But theres also a trend of feeling swindled by the IRL influencers.

One viral Twitter thread accused Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway of using her online image to scam attendees out of $165 to attend her creativity workshop.

And angry mobs incensed by the fiasco that was Fyre Festival an event so botched it warranted not one, but two documentaries directed much of their ire at the event’s celebrity influencers.

The defrauded cited a lack of transparency as to what the influencers were paid to hawk the festival to their millions of followers online, although not everyone agreed they deserved the blame to begin with.

 

• But sometimes the influencers themselves can get scammed.

One variety of online grift victimizes the influencers themselves with identity-fraud tactics common to phishing.

Earlier this year, a scammer posing as entrepreneur and investor Wendi Murdoch used email handles and other techniques so convincing, social media stars were tricked into buying their own flights to Indonesia and paying for fake photography permits as part of the scam.

The victims, influencers and travel photographers among them, got bilked out of thousands of dollars in the process.

The FBI and New York Police Department opened investigations into the scam in 2018, according to The Hollywood Reporter . Also assisting is the corporate investigations firm K2 Intelligence, which tracked the scams pivot from celebrities to influencers.

 

For a long time, they were going after people in Hollywood. [Now, theyre] routinely targeting influencers Instagram stars, travel photographers, people who do stuff that involves them travelling all over the world,” Nicoletta Kotsianas, a director at K2 Intelligence, told INSIDER in January.

It’s about convincing some people that theres someone else, and manipulating them, being into that, and world-building around the whole thing, she added. Theyre making some money off it, but its really about the ride along the way.

 

• Ransomware held a whole city hostage in 2018.

Some of the most insidious online scams involve ransomware.

In a ransomware attack, hackers install malware onto a computer or system of computers that restricts a victim’s access to their files. Payment, often in the form of bitcoin, is demanded to undo it.

Atlanta’s government was hobbled by a ransomware attack in 2018, and wound up costing the city more than $2.6 million to recover from, according to a Wired report.

The hackers behind the scheme “deliberately engaged in an extreme form of 21st-century digital blackmail, attacking and extorting vulnerable victims like hospitals and schools, victims they knew would be willing and able to pay, Brian Benczkowski, the head of the criminal division of the Justice Department, said in November .

Its no wonder the menacing form of attack has made it into a “Grey’s Anatomy” plotline .

 

• Fake ransomware traps can be equally damaging.

At their worst, ransomware scams exploit the victims sense of security and privacy.

And in one terrifying variation, attackers claim via email to have hacked a webcam while the target watched porn .

The cam-hacking claim, which is bolstered by parroting the users password in the email, is means for blackmail: Send us bitcoin, or we send all your contacts the footage.

The reality? Pure manipulation. The scammers dont have dossiers of footage. They never even hacked you. How? Because the password they flaunted wasnt hacked, but harvested, gleaned from publicly available databases of leaked passwords and emails.

So theres no need to cover your laptops camera. For now.

 

• GoFundMe fake-outs take advantage of peoples generosity.

Another thriving online grift is the GoFundMe sob story fake-out.

One notable example came in a feel-good story from 2017 about a couple raising $400,000 for a homeless veteran who had lent them his last $20. As prosecutors discovered, the trio had concocted the entire story, and not only do they face a mix of federal and state charges , but GoFundMe refunded the donations of all 14,000 contributors.

Another example of strategic storytelling in the art of crowdsourced scamming: A black college student who raised money from Republicans on GoFundMe after claiming her parents disowned her for supporting Trump.

The narrative was suspiciously convenient because it was a hoax. Although she quickly returned the money she raised, she also exposed how easily you can take advantage of people’s generosity.

 

• Pump-and-dump schemes can artificially inflate the value of a currency.

Cryptocurrency is often the form of payment in online scams, but in one scheme, the crypto itself is the fraud.

Investment schemes were always destined to flourish online. By using the web to mass target would-be investors, a schemer can commit the Securities and Exchange Commission no-no of artificially pumping up the value of stock to the masses in order to then dump the stock on a falsely inflated return.

According to The Outline, thousands of people gather online on apps like Discord and scheme to pump and dump cryptocurrencies (known as s—coins and scamcoins to those duped by the ploy):

[The] ethos is simple: Buy low, sell high. The implication is that investors outside the pump group will see the rapidly rising price and rush to buy in, anxious not to miss the next Bitcoin-style gold rush,” Paris Martineau of The Outline wrote.

 

Grayscale has had its crypto holdings gain ten times since the start of 2020.

The world’s biggest crypto hedge fund manager Grayscale closed 2020 with a whopping sum of $20 billion under its management.

Grayscale, whose publicly-traded crypto assets offer rich investors the chance in trading crypto on the equity market, had its crypto holdings gain ten times since the start of 2020.

Most of the massive holding of the crypto hedge fund juggernaut includes $17.4 billion held in Grayscale Bitcoin Trust. That said, also soaring Bitcoin’s in prices helped the hedge fund hit $20 billion by the end of 2020.

Bitcoin lately struck a new all-time high on New Year’s day of just over $29,500.

One of the key advantage crypto investors have accessing trusts like Grayscale’s are they can trade their crypto trusts on the stock market, which is useful for people wanting to trade from tax-sheltered accounts.

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust is a traditional investment vehicle with shares titled in the investors’ name, providing a familiar structure for financial and tax advisors and easy transferability to beneficiaries under estate laws.

The Trust has seen its assets under management (“AUM”) surge from $1.9 billion to $20 billion YTD.

Grayscale Bitcoin Trust does not operate a redemption program and its shares do not trade on a national securities exchange.

 

$350 million worth of Bitcoin moved by a large entity as it nears $30,000

A large entity transferred 12,000 BTC worth $350,442,906 from an unknown wallet to another unknown wallet.

Large entities in the Bitcoin market have begun moving a significant amount of the world’s most popular crypto at the start of 2021.

Data retrieved from Whale Alert, an advanced crypto tracker, revealed a large entity transferred 12,000 BTC worth $350,442,906, from Unknown wallet to Unknown wallet.

At the Bitcoin market, investors or traders who own large amounts of bitcoins are typically known as Bitcoin whale.

 

This means that a BTC whale would be an individual or business entity (with a single Bitcoin address), that owns around 1000 coins or more.

As BTC whales accumulate BTCs, Bitcoin’s circulating supply reduces, and this can weaken any bearish trend bitcoin finds itself in.

Meaning that over time, it’s possible that as BTC approaches its fixed supply of 21 million – the price of BTC will go up, with BTC’s present demand factored in.

Crypto fans are cheering Bitcoin as an inflation hedge in an era of unprecedented amounts of quantitative easing triggered by many central banks globally.

Also, leading household names in finance that include Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller endorsed it as an alternative asset, adding to the rally. Not forgetting listed U.S brands like MicroStrategy Inc. and Square Inc. that moved their cash reserves into crypto in search of better returns than what near-zero interest rates deliver.

Also, a leading crypto expert, Willy Woo, via his Twitter handle, hinted that Bitcoin’s price could still rally higher on the bias that the

Geneva, SWITZERLAND – For the second time in a row, Funds Recovery Professionals has bagged the prestigious award as the Most Reliable Bitcoin Recovery Company in the World 2021 at the recent BitCoin Awards 2021.

Due to new COVID-19 restrictions amid the third wave of the deadly pandemic, the awards ceremony was held as a virtual event, with top stakeholders following live from across the globe.

Funds Recovery Pro, a registered renowned independent legal organization headquartered in Califonia, USA, was named the Most Reliable Bitcoin Recovery Company in the world for the second time in as many years.

The company is a legal funds recovery firm with a strong international presence that serves a wide range of clients – from individuals, local and international businesses, and public sector organizations.

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Their lawyers, arbitrators, enforcers, and other professionals have a distinguished history of service to the international community and international businesses – as well as being a trusted advisors for our private clients.

The announcement is coming after Coinbase recently announced the listing of Dogecoin after the conclusion of successful tests in May

In what has appeared to be a welcome development to crypto investors and enthusiasts around the world, the announcement of Funds Recovery Professionals as the recipient of the revered award was greeted with fanfare.

In a blog post by the crypto powerhouse, Coinbase, Funds Recovery Professionals was congratulated for its efforts in assisting individuals and organizations around the world to recover stolen Bitcoin to the tune of 760 Million U.S Dollars with 6 months.

The Blog post also read that:

“Inbound transfers for DOGE [and Bitcoin] are now available in the regions where trading is supported.

“Trading will begin on or after 9 a.m. PT on Thursday if liquidity conditions are met,” the post read.

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You will recall that Crypto-currency expert and CEO, Brian Armstrong had during the May 15 investors call, speculated the possible induction and launching of additional cryptocurrency on his platform. He made the comments while responding to a question about how his organization intended to “accelerate asset addition into the future.”

In his response, he said, “There are more and more assets being created in the crypto economy, which has been getting a lot of attention recently.”

Tesla billionaire Elon Musk has in the past made conscious efforts to raise the price of the coin through his investments and online promotions.

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Reacting to the award, the Head, Legal Forensics at Funds Recovery Professionals, Ms. Nikita Ferguson thanked the organizers and stakeholders for recognizing the efforts of the team in recovering stolen Bitcoin for individuals and organizations.

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Adding that the organization specializes in recovering large amounts of Bitcoin has been fraudulently converted from their rightful owners by scammers under various disguises.

In his official speech, read during the awards ceremony, Head of Operations of the organization, Steve Rodri, Jr. said the company is made up of professionals who go over and beyond the call of duty to assist in the recovery of stolen Bitcoin from fraudsters.

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He said the recognition will challenge the company to do more in its fight to eradicate the world of fraudsters who target crypto stakeholders.