EURONEXT
Over the last few years the European Union has really changed the face of the continent by bringing the countries closer together. One way in which this was done was by merging the financial markets. The stock markets of several nations were combined to create the Euronext stock exchange. This has grown to become on the largest and most important stock exchanges in the world. It continues to grow as it mergers with other stock markets in the region.
The Euronext is the largest stock exchange in Europe. It was created in 2000 when several European stock exchanges where merged together in order to take advantage of the new rules that came into effect in the European Union. The combination took the stock exchanges of Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris and merged the together. Over the years they have also picked up several other stock exchanges in Europe. They have also merged with the New York Stock Exchange. This in theory creates the world's largest stock exchange although the two exchanges continue to operate separately; they just have the same owner.
The Euronext is located in Amsterdam but it also has subsidiary exchanges in several other European cities. The Euronext works like most other stock exchanges these days with trading done by a mixture of brokers and computerized trading. One difference between with other exchanges is that they also allow the trading of derivatives and commodities. Normally this is done on a separate market however the Euronext allows this as well as the trading of stocks. This makes things a lot simpler for investors who are interested in trading these instruments in addition to trading stocks.
In addition to being the largest stock exchange in Europe it can also be argued that it is the oldest exchange in the world. One of its founding members was the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. Founded in 1602 this is widely regarded to be the world's first stock exchange. The Dutch built an empire on the strength of their financial markets as it gave them an easy way to raise capital for commercial expeditions. The ease with which they raised this money led other countries to follow their lead and soon stock exchanges became commonplace. Even today the Netherlands is regarded as one of the world's leaders when it comes to finance.
Like most large stock exchanges there is a lot of interest in the movement of Euronext. In order to make it easy to keep track of the changes in the market it is easiest to use an index of some sort. Most people are familiar with Dow Jones Industrial Average that is used on the New York Stock Exchange. The index used on the Euronext is the Euronext 100. This is an index of the hundred largest stocks on the exchange and is generally considered to be one of the most important indexes in the world; certainly it is the most important in Europe.