Route of Corporate Shares Mapped — How Financial Market Experts Interact

Investment banks are expert firms working in the financial market. Here traders, analysts, brokers, and corporate bankers, work with stocks, complementing each other in terms of expertise. The new book ’Marketing Shares, Sharing Markets’ explains how these financial experts interact in various ways to enact financial markets.

The book is a product of a research project led by Karin Winroth, a business scholar at Södertörn University, including also Hans Kjellberg and Jesper Blomberg, both Associate Professors at the Stockholm School of Economics.

Several overlapping Markets are called ‘the Financial Market’

Karin Winroth explains that the various experts who participate in the stock market or its auxiliary services, perceive of corporate shares in various ways depending on their professional tasks.

What in everyday language is referred to as ‘the financial market’ is actually several different markets that partially overlap. This can for instance be the primary and secondary stock market, currency markets, and bond markets. Depending on what the experts work with, they will refer to different parts of these markets in their discussions and recommendations.

When the media report on the financial markets there are thus different stories presented depending on whether they are talking with an analyst, a trader, a broker or a corporate banker.
It’s not surprising that the functioning of financial markets are hard to grasp, as these different experts will refer to various parts when commenting upon the markets.

The new book is intended to illuminate how the practices of the experts’ contribute to how financial markets are shaped and are understood. Whether actors within the markets take interest in such information probably varies.

– The actors in financial markets can in some respects benefit from a fuzzy conception of the markets, says Karin Winroth. This makes it easier to blame the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, and they can thereby avoid taking full responsibility for activities that they participate in.

The new book introduces the reader to the financial world. It focuses on stocks, stock markets and the experts working within these markets. It describes in everyday terms the various practices of the expert work involved in what is called investment banking and how this section of the ‘financial machinery’ functions. The analyses focus upon the consequences these practices have for investment banks, investors, and corporations.

The book follows the route of a share through the system, which provides an understanding of what the various experts do. The practice of each expert group is presented in separate chapters and analyzed. This is followed by one chapter analyzing the interplay of the experts and a final chapter presenting the experts contribution in the enactment of the financial markets.

The authors have interviewed several people with experience from Swedish and international investment banks. As the practices of investment banking are international, the findings of the project are relevant globally.

The comprehensive data presented in the book is unique. It is moreover unusual to find studies that cover all four expert groups involved in investment banking and their interaction.

The research project “Organizing the Multi-Professional Market Maker” is funded by the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Fund.