What and why are shares?

Businesses need money to get started, and even more to expand and grow. When setting up, entrepreneurs raise some of this from savings, friends and families, and the rest from banks and venture capitalists. Backers get a receipt for their money which shows that their investment makes them part-owners of the company and so have a share of the business (hence the name).

Unlike banks, which provide short-term finance at specified rates that has to be repaid, these investors are not lenders: they are the owners. If there are 100,000 shares issued by the company, someone having
10,000 of them owns a tenth of the business. That means the managing director and the rest of the board are
the shareholders’ employees just as much as the shop-floor foreman or the cleaner. Being a shareholder carries all sorts of privileges, including the right to appoint the board and the auditors.

In return for risking their money, shareholders of successful companies receive dividends. The amount varies
with what the company can afford to pay out, which in turn depends on profits.

At some stage the business may need more than those original sources can provide. In addition, there comes a time when some of the original investors want to withdraw their backing, especially if it can be at a profit.

The only way to do that would be by selling the shares, which meant finding an interested buyer,which in itself would be far from easy, and then haggling about the price, which would be awkward. A public marketplace was devised for trading them – a stock exchange. Companies ‘go public’when they get their shares quoted on the stock exchange to make things easy for investors a neat little device invented by the Dutch right at the start of the 17th century