is the bankruptcy of exchange markets possible?
You seem to think that stock exchanges are much more than they actually are. But it's right there in the name: stock exchange. It's a place where people exchange (i.e. trade) stocks, no more and no less. All it does is enable the trading (and thereby price finding). Supposedly they went into mysterious bankruptcy then what will happen to the listed companies  Absolutely nothing. They may have to use a different exchange if they're planning an IPO or stock buyback, that's all. and to the shareholder's stock who invested in companies that were listed in these markets ?  Absolutley nothing. It still belongs to them. Trades that were in progress at the moment the exchange went down might be problematic, but usually the shutdown would happen in a manner that takes care of it, and ultimately the trade either went through or it didn't (and you still have the money). It might take some time to establish this. Let's suppose I am an investor and I bought stocks from a listed company in NYSE and NYSE went into bankruptcy, even though NYSE is a unique business, meaning it doesn't have to do anything with that firm which I invested in. How would I know the stock price of that firm  Look at a different stock exchange. There are dozens even within the USA, hundreds internationally. and will I lose my purchased stocks ?  Of course not, they will still be listed as yours at your broker. In general, what will happen after that ?  People will use different stock exchanges, and some of them migth get overloaded from the additional volume. Expect some inconveniences but no huge problems. @MichaelBorgwardt gave an excellent answer. Let me add a little analogy here that might help. Suppose you bought a car from Joe's Auto Sales. You pay your money, do all the paperwork, and drive your car home. The next day Joe's goes bankrupt. What affect does that have on your ownership rights to your car? The answer is, Absolutely none. Same thing with stocks and a stock exchange. A stock exchange is basically just a store where you can buy stock. Once you buy it, it's yours. That said, there could potentially be a problem with record keeping. If you bought a car from Joe's Auto Sales, and Joe went out of business before sending the registration paperwork to the state, you might find that the state has no record that you legally own the car and you could have difficulty proving it. Likewise if a stock exchange went out of business without getting all their records properly updated, their might be an issue. Actually I think the bigger concern here for most folks would be their broker and not the stock exchange, as your broker is the one who keeps the records of what stocks you own long term. In practice, though, most companies are responsible enough to clean up their paperwork properly when they go out of business, and if they don't, a successor company or government regulators or someone will try to clean it all up. It might be easiest to think of stock exchanges like brokers.  If you buy a home, and your broker goes bankrupt, you still own your home, but you could not sell it without the aid of another broker.   Same with stocks, you own the stocks you buy, but you would be unable to either purchase new stocks or sell your stock holdings without an exchange.
"i deleted my comment that this was a reply to so I'll repost it.  It was:   &gt;I don't know the answer, but I'm pretty sure this is incorrect.  You have to take into account the correlations of the securities across the three different markets.  It's definitely not as simple as dividing by three.  The reason why I don't think this is correct is because you can imagine an exchange in which there is only one other security, and the asset in question is perfectly correlated and therefore has a beta of 1.  You could then have a different exchange with thousands of securities where the asset has a beta of 0.3.  The  simple average method would produce a beta of .65, when it's probably true that the correct answer is closer to 0.3.  The solution is not generalizable so I don't think it can be right. It neglects the relative sizes of the exchanges and the correlation of the underlying assets with each other.  Which leads me to consider, perhaps the right thing to do is to calculate the returns across all three exchanges and the returns of the asset on all three exchanges, do a weighted average and use that variance/covariance to calculate the beta across all three exchanges.  I'm not sure what purpose, practically, such a beta would serve.  I think the correct answer is to take the beta of the asset with respect to the largest (most diversified) exchange.  Ultimately, using a basket of securities like the S&amp;P 500 is just a proxy for ""the market"", whatever that means.  It doesn't truly represent the realm of possibilities for the diversified investor, but it's close enough  tl,dr: I say pick one exchange and go with it" I suspect that the times you are referring to are those times when there is relatively low volumes of foreign exchange trading.  Lower volumes of trading make it possible for large orders to have a disproportionate effect on the market price.  This implies that the times to avoid will be the times with the lowest relative volumes.  This will occur on the cusp between the New York market winding down and the Asia/Tokyo market revving up. This will be in the hours preceding Tokyo's opening at 06:00 Tokyo time, so the time to avoid is about 04:00-06:00 Tokyo time, or about 20:00-22:00 GMT (if I've worked out the time difference correctly). Foreign exchange is a 24 hour, global market.  Although each of the three main trading centres - London, New York, Asia - will operate 24 hours a day, they will maintain only a skeleton staff outside of normal working hours.  The time difference between London and New York is only 5 hours, so there is no period of time when both centres are operating with a skeleton staff.  The time difference between London and Tokyo is 8 hours, so again there is no period of time when both centres are operating with a skeleton staff.  The time difference between New York and Tokyo is 13 hours.  This does include a period where both centres are operating with a skeleton staff, as well as London operating on a skeleton staff.  Thus, in the couple of hours immediately preceding Tokyo's opening for the regular trading day there is minimal coverage in each of the three main trading centres.  As mentioned above, this is the time when large orders can have a disproportionate effect on fx rates and so this is the time to avoid. "That article, like almost any article written by a non-expert and quoting only ""research"" from lobbying groups, hugely misses the point. The vast majority of orders that end up being cancelled are cancelled as a standard part of exchanges' official market-maker programs. Each exchange wants you and me to know that it has liquidity -- that when we go to buy or sell some stock, there will be someone waiting on the other side of the trade.  So the exchange pays (via lowered fees or even rebates) hundreds of registered market makers to constantly have orders resting in each product's order book within a few ticks of the current NBBO or the last trade price.  That way, if everyone else should suddenly disappear from the market, you and I will still be able to trade our shares for a price somewhat close to the last trade price. But market makers who are simply acting in this ""backstop"" role don't actually want to have their orders filled, because those orders will almost always lose them money. So as prices rise and fall (as much as tens of times per second), the market makers need to cancel their resting orders (so they don't get filled) and add new ones at new prices (so they meet their obligations to the exchange).  And because the number of orders resting in any given product's order book is vastly larger than the number of actual trades that take place in any given time period, naturally the number of cancellations is also going to hugely outweigh the number of actual trades.  As much as 97% to 3% (or even more). But that's completely fine! You and I don't have to care about any of that.  We almost never need the market makers to be there to trade with us.  They're only there as a backstop.  There's almost always plenty of organic liquidity for us to trade against.  Only in the rare case where liquidity completely dries up do we really care that the registered market makers are there.  And in those cases (ideally) the market makers can't cancel their orders (depending on how well the exchange has set up its market maker program). So, to answer your question, the effect of standard order cancellation on a stock is essentially none.  If you were to visualize the resting orders in a product's book as prices moved up and down, you would essentially see a Gaussian distribution with mean at the last trade price, and it would move up and down with the price.  That ""movement"" is accomplished by cancellations followed by new orders. P.S. As always, keep in mind that your and my orders almost never actually make it to a real stock exchange anymore.  Nowadays they are almost always sent to brokers' and big banks' internal dark pools.  And in there you and I have no idea what shenanigans are going on.  As just one example, dark pools allow their operators and (for a fee) other institutional participants access to a feature called last look that allows them to cancel their resting order as late as after your order has been matched against it! :( Regarding the question in your comment ... If Alice is sending only bona fide orders (that is, only placing an order at time T if, given all the information she has at time T, she truly wants and intends for it to be filled) then her cancellation at a later time actually adds to the effectiveness of and public perception of the market as a tool for price discovery (which is its ultimate purpose). [In the following example imagine that there are no such things as trading fees or commissions or taxes.] Let's say Alice offers to buy AAPL at $99.99 when the rest of the market is trading it for $100.00.  By doing so she is casting her vote that the ""fair value"" of a share of AAPL is between $99.99 and $100.00. After all, if she thought the fair value of a share of AAPL was higher --  say, between $100.00 and $100.01 -- then she should be willing to pay $100.00 (because that's below fair value) and she should expect that other people in the market will not soon decide to sell to her at $99.99. If some time later Alice does decide that the fair value of AAPL is between $100.00 and $100.01 then she should definitely cancel her order at $99.99, for exactly the reason discussed above.  She probably won't get filled at $99.99, and by sitting there stubbornly she's missing out (potentially forever) on the possibility to make a profit. Through the simple act of cancelling her $99.99 order, Alice is once again casting a vote that she no longer thinks that's AAPL's fair value.  She is (very slightly) altering the collective opinion of the entire market as to what a share of AAPL is worth.  And if her cancellation then frees her up to place another order closer to her perceived fair value (say, at $100.00), then that's another vote for her honest optinion about AAPL's price. Since the whole goal of the market is to get a bunch of particpants to figure out the fair value of some financial instrument (or commodity, or smart phone, or advertising time, etc.), cancellations of honest votes from the past in order to replace them with new, better-informed honest votes in the present can only be a good thing for the market's effectiveness and perceived effectiveness. It's only when participants start sending non-honest votes (non bona fide orders) that things start to go off the rails.  That's what @DumbCoder was referring to in his comment on your original question." e.g. a European company has to pay 1 million USD exactly one year from now While that is theoretically possible, that is not a very common case. Mostly likely if they had to make a 1 million USD payment a year from now and they had the cash on hand they would be able to just make the payment today.  A more common scenario for currency forwards is for investment hedging.  Say that European company wants to buy into a mutual fund of some sort, say FUSEX. That is a USD based mutual fund. You can't buy into it directly with Euros. So if the company wants to buy into the fund they would need to convert their Euros to to USD. But now they have an extra risk parameter. They are not just exposed to the fluctuations of the fund, they are also exposed to the fluctuations of the currency market. Perhaps that fund will make a killing, but the exchange rate will tank and they will lose all their gains. By creating a forward to hedge their currency exposure risk they do not face this risk (flip side: if the exchange rate rises in a favorable rate they also don't get that benefit, unless they use an FX Option, but that is generally more expensive and complicated). There are various indexes on the stock market that track the currencies.  Though it is different than Forex (probably less leverage), you may be able to get the effects you're looking for.  I don't have a lot of knowledge in this area, but looked some into FXE, to trade the Euro debt crisis.  Here's an article on Forex, putting FXE down (obviously a biased view, but perhaps will give you a starting point for comparison, should you want to trade something specific, like the current euro/dollar situation). Who would be committing this fraud?  Satoshi Nakamoto?  Good luck finding him.    You can't punish people for speculatively investing just like they couldn't punish many people for the Great Depression since it was mostly the people who fucked themselves over.    Fraud implies an element of deceit.  This cannot reasonably be called a fraud--at best, it could be called a bubble. No. Such companies don't exist. Derivative instruments have evolved over a period and there is a market place, stock exchange with members / broker with obligations etc clearly laid out and enforceable. If I understand correctly say the house is at 300 K. You would like a option to sell it to someone for 300 K after 6 months. Lets say you are ready to pay a premium of 10K for this option. After 6 months, if the market price is 400 K you would not exercise the option and if the market price of your house is 200 K you would exercise the option and ask the option writer to buy your house for 300 K. There are quite a few challenges, i.e. who will moderate this transaction. How do we arrive that house is valued at 300K. There could be actions taken by you to damage the property and hence its reduction in value, etc. i.e. A stock exchange like market place for house is not there and it may or may not develop in future. If you want to make money while European equities markets are crashing and the Euro itself is devaluing: None of these strategies are to be taken lightly. All involve risk. There are probably numerous ways that you can lose even though it seems like you should win. Transaction fees could eat your profits, especially if you have only a small amount of capital to invest with. The worst part is that they all involve timing. If you think the crash is coming next week, you could, say, buy a bunch of puts. But if the crash doesn't come for another 6 months, all of your puts are going to expire worthless and you've lost all of your capital. Even worse, if you sell short an index ETF this week in advance of next week's impending crash, and some rescue package arrives over the weekend, equity prices could spike at the beginning of the week and you'd be screwed.