The Australian Stock Exchange (ASX) is the main stock exchange in Australia.Other mirror exchanges exist but they simply mirror the Australian Exchange. The Stock Exchange started off as individual exchanges in different states which were established as far back as 1871.
Trading on the stock exchange is all electronic not like in days gone by where it was all manual and left up to humans. The system responsible for was called SEATS but has since been taken over by a new, far superior electronic system capable of many more transactions per second called ITS which stands for Intergrated Trading System.
The current Managing Director of the Australian Securities Exchange is Robert Elstone who was appinted in 2006.
There are four major index's which are regularly quoted and these include the All Ordinaries, The Top 200 (list of the top 200 stocks),the Top 100 (list of the top 100 stocks and the ASX 50 which contains the top 50 stocks.The most common indices which we often here on the news are the Top 200 and the All Ords. They are still watched by investors as the bench mark indices and are an indication of where the market is traveling. The Australian Securities Exchange is a public company and is listed on it's own Exchange. Every stock listed is assigned a three letter code.
The current market capitalisation is believed to be about 1 trillion dollars with approx 2200 listed companies to date.
The Stock Exchange trades approx 500 000 trades a day.
The mining stocks make up a very large portion of the index especially with the recent Mining resource boom.Some of the biggest stocks traded that make up the index include,Rio Tinto, BHP Billiton, National Australia Bank and Telstra.
There are many rules regarding listing on the Australian Securities Exchange but this can be a great way for companies to expand and get new funds into their coffers.
For ASX Share Prices please go to our share prices page.
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