An Introduction to Financial Markets on Wall Street

Define the function of financial markets within the system and explain how equity and fixed income markets, with intermediaries, move funds from savers to borrowers.

Explore the structure of financial markets, including debt and equity issuance, the international foreign exchange market, and primary versus secondary markets and key stock exchanges.

Explore the debt markets, from global debt at an all-time high and private versus government debt dynamics to US bond types, mortgage-backed securities, and rising student loan delinquencies.

Explore the foreign exchange market, or forex, the world's largest market with about 5 trillion dollars traded 24 hours a day, except weekends, across eight centers led by London.

Explore depository institutions such as commercial banks and credit unions, and contractual savings institutions like life insurance companies and pension funds that intermediate funds to provide term finance.

Explain how governments regulate financial markets to increase investor information and ensure soundness, detailing the SEC, CFTC, FDIC, and the Fed, and summarize the subprime crisis and the Great Recession.

Explain why financial institutions matter by moving funds from savers to borrowers through depository, contractual, and investment types, and compare funding sources in the US and China.

Analyze bank assets across China, the eurozone, the US, and Japan to reveal global finance dynamics, including China’s rise as the largest banking system by assets in 2016.

Explore insurance companies, their premiums, and major policy types; learn about reinsurance and key firms like Berkshire Hathaway, AXA, Allianz, and Munich Re, plus crisis-era bailouts and credit default swaps.

Examine public and private pension funds, retirement assets, and accounts like IRAs and DC plans, and the effect of low interest rates on liabilities.

Explore mutual funds as professionally managed investment funds with open-ended and closed-ended types, priced by nav, and etfs that track indices such as the s&p 500.

Explore how investment banks underwrite securities, advise on mergers and acquisitions, and provide market making across equities, fixed income, currencies, and commodities, while contrasting sell side and buy side.

Explore hedge funds, investment structures run by a registered investment advisor, using leverage and derivatives across strategies like convertible arbitrage, equity long/short, macro, and multi-strategy.

Explore stock, fx, and commodities, and learn about derivatives such as forward, future, and options. Discover stock categories by type, cap, sector, and valuation methods, including fundamental and technical analyses.

Discover the global fx market's 24-hour liquidity, the US dollar's dominance, and core instruments—spot, forward, future, and currency swap—along with commodity futures used to hedge risk.

Explore how financial derivatives derive value from underlying assets, focusing on forward and future contracts for hedging and speculation, and how margin reduces liquidity and default risk.

Explore how options, a type of derivative, use calls and puts with strike, expiry, premiums, and payoffs. Examine how exercising the option depends on the underlying asset price at expiration.

Analyze vanilla options, including European and American types, and exotic options such as digital and barrier options, and learn pricing with the Black-Scholes model.

Explore fixed income securities, including bonds, mortgage-backed and asset-backed securities, and fixed income derivatives such as futures, options, swaps, CDS, CMO, and CDO, with a focus on issuers.

Explore how bonds differ by issuer: government, municipal, agency, and corporate, and learn about maturity, principal, coupons, yield, duration, and credit and interest rate risks.

Mortgage backed securities, or MBS, include RMBS and CMBS with agency (guaranteed by Ginnie Mae, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac) and non-agency versions, exposing investors to prepayment and rate risk.

Understand asset backed securities, a fixed income instrument with cash flows from non-mortgage loans—credit card, auto, home equity, and student loans—and highlight auto and student debt in the United States.

Explore fixed income derivatives, including bond futures and bond options, and learn how treasury futures, agency and municipal futures work alongside interest rate swaps, swaptions, and credit default swaps.

Explore fixed income derivatives, focusing on interest rate swaps and swaptions, their over-the-counter structure, counterparty risk, and hedge strategies using fixed or floating rate payments.

Explore credit default swaps as risk-transfer contracts, including single-name, basket CDS, and CDX, then examine CMOs and CDOs with tranche structures and correlation effects.

Explore employment types on Wall Street, review data showing 6.2 million financial services jobs and 4.3% of the workforce, and map economic contributions by insurance, banks, and funds.

Understand how financial firms organize around front, middle, and back offices, with ceo, cio, and cfo guiding operations, and explore roles in sales, trading, risk management, and operations.

Explore the diverse jobs on Wall Street, from sales and investor relationship strategists to back-office operations, developers, quants, analysts, traders, and portfolio managers.