Which exchanges run the world's trading?
"The stock market" is actually dozens of marketplaces spread across time zones, each with its own listed companies, hours and personality. A quick world tour turns news phrases like "European markets closed higher" from noise into a map.
The heavyweights
- United States: the NYSE and Nasdaq — together, home to the largest share of world equity value by a wide margin. NYSE hosts many industrial-era giants; Nasdaq grew up with technology companies, and the split still colors their reputations.
- Europe: the London Stock Exchange, pan-European Euronext (Paris, Amsterdam and more), Germany's Deutsche Börse (Xetra).
- Asia: the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Hong Kong (HKEX), and mainland China's Shanghai and Shenzhen exchanges — the world's fastest-growing exchange region of recent decades.
A company lists on an exchange — passing its requirements for size, disclosure and governance — and its shares then trade there under a ticker. Big firms sometimes list in two places (dual listing) to reach more investors.
Why "where" matters to you
- Hours. Each exchange trades in its own local day (you learned the US session in Course 1). A company's price only updates while ITS exchange is open — a fact that explains many "stale" quotes when you follow companies across markets. This is one detail our data-literacy unit (next course) makes practical.
- Currency. A share trades in its exchange's currency: Toyota in yen in Tokyo, its US-listed counterpart in dollars. Same business, two price charts, one exchange rate between them.
- Rules. Listing standards and disclosure differ by country — part of why identical-looking companies can carry different investor trust.
The US-listed counterpart is usually not the share itself. A depositary receipt (ADR in the United States, GDR elsewhere) is a certificate issued by a bank that holds a fixed number of the home shares in custody, and it trades on the local exchange in local currency. One receipt may stand for ten home shares or for one tenth of one, so its price is the home price times the ratio times the exchange rate, and the two quotes will never match by eye. Dividends arrive through the bank, converted, with the home country's withholding taken and a small depositary fee deducted. The name usually tells you: Toyota's New York listing, TM, calls itself "Toyota Motor Corporation ADR", which is how you learn a ticker is a receipt rather than the share.
The relay race
Follow one 24-hour cycle: Tokyo opens while New York sleeps → Europe wakes as Asia closes → New York takes the baton in Europe's afternoon. News lands somewhere on that ribbon around the clock, and each region's open "responds" to what happened while it slept. The market never really sleeps — it just changes continents.
In the data
Here is Toyota's New York receipt, as its profile describes it:
Three rows carry the lesson: the name says receipt, the exchange is New York's, and the currency is the dollar, while the business itself earns and reports in yen in Tokyo. That currency row is why the same company can have two honest price charts that never match.
One more thing a data provider's map shows you. Market data usually files every US stock under a single code, US, and that one code spans the New York Stock Exchange, Nasdaq, Cboe and the OTC market at once. So the suffix on a ticker like AAPL.US tells you the country, not the exchange; the company profile is where the listing venue is named.
Try it now
- Find which exchange a company lists on, and its ticker there. Apple's profile is below: the exchange row names the venue. For your own anchor company, open it in the Terminal and change the symbol there.
Open AAPL.US in the EODHD Terminal
- Which of the world's major exchanges are open RIGHT NOW? Take the time in UTC where you are, and hold it against the UTC opening and closing times in the three venue records in the next two steps — New York, London and Hong Kong. Check the day of the week too: every one of them is shut on Saturday and Sunday.
- Now put a number on the relay race. The New York and London records below each give the opening and closing time in UTC, one clock for both, so nobody has to reason about time zones twice. Work out how many hours a day the two are open at the same time. It is a small number, and it is the window in which a London desk and a New York desk are looking at the same live market.
- Do it once more with a venue in Asia, Hong Kong's record below, against New York, and notice what you get: for most Asian and American pairs the answer is zero. That is why "European markets closed higher" is a sentence about a baton that was already passed.
- Pick any famous non-US company and check where it trades and in what currency — your first taste of markets as a world map rather than one American ticker tape. Volkswagen's preference shares on Germany's Xetra are linked below; the suffix after the dot is the venue, and the Terminal shows the currency beside the price. Change the symbol there for any company you like.
Open VOW3.XETRA in the EODHD Terminal
Build it yourself
See why the exchange suffix is part of a ticker's identity, by building a list that mixes them. Your tickers, in one call