Can a stock exchange company actually go bust?
A stock exchange is a marketplace where people can bring their goods [shares] to be traded. There are certain rules. Stock Exchange does not own any shares of the companies that are trading in.  The list of who owns with stock is with the registrar of each company. The electronic shares are held by a Financial Institution [Securities Depository]. So even if the exchange itself goes down, you still hold the same shares as you had before it went down. One would now have to find ways to trade these shares ... possibly via other stock exchange. This leaves the question of inflight transactions, which again would be recorded and available. Think of it similar to eBay. What happens when eBay goes bankrupt? Nothing much, all the seller still have their goods with them. All the buyers who had purchased good before have it when them ... so the question remains on inflight goods where the buyer has paid the seller and not yet received shipments ... Technically, of course. Almost any company can go bankrupt. One small note: a company goes bankrupt, not its stock. Its stock may become worthless in bankruptcy, but a stock disappearing or being delisted doesn't necessarily mean the company went bankrupt. Bankruptcy has implications for a company's debt as well, so it applies to more than just its stock. I don't know of any historical instances where this has happened, but presumably, the warning signs of bankruptcy would be evident enough that a few things could happen.  Another company, e.g. another exchange, holding firm, etc. could buy out the exchange that's facing financial difficulty, and the companies traded on it would transfer to the new company that's formed. If another exchange bought out the struggling exchange, the shares of the latter could transfer to the former. This is an attractive option because exchanges possess a great deal of infrastructure already in place. Depending on the country, this could face regulatory scrutiny however. Other firms or governments could bail out the exchange if no one presented a buyout offer. The likelihood of this occurring depends on several factors, e.g. political will, the government(s) in question, etc. For a smaller exchange, the exchange could close all open positions at a set price. This is exactly what happened with the Hong Kong Mercantile Exchange (HKMex) that MSalters mentioned. When the exchange collapsed in May 2013, it closed all open positions for their price on the Thursday before the shutdown date. I don't know if a stock exchange would simply close all open positions at a set price, since equity technically exists in perpetuity regardless of the shutdown of an exchange, while many derivatives have an expiration date. Furthermore, this might not be a feasible option for a large exchange. For example, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange lists thousands of products and manages hundreds of millions of transactions, so closing all open positions could be a significant undertaking.  If none of the above options were available, I presume companies listed on the exchange would actively move to other, more financially stable exchanges. These companies wouldn't simply go bankrupt. Contracts can always be listed on other exchanges as well. Considering the high level of mergers and acquisitions, both unsuccessful and successful,  in the market for exchanges in recent years, I would assume that option 1 would be the most likely (see the NYSE Euronext/Deutsche Börse merger talks and the NYSE Euronext/ICE merger that's currently in progress), but for smaller exchanges, there is the recent historical precedent of the HKMex that speaks to #3. Also, the above answer really only applies to publicly traded stock exchanges, and not all stock exchanges are publicly-held entities. For example, the Shanghai Stock Exchange is a quasi-governmental organization, so I presume option 2 would apply because it already receives government backing. Its bankruptcy would mean something occurred for the government to withdraw its backing or that it became public, and a discussion of those events occurring in the future is pure speculation.
The stock market is generally a long term investment platform.  The share prices reflect more the companies potential to be profitable in the future rather than its actual value.  Companies that have good potential can over perform their actual value.  We saw this regularly  in the early days of the internet prior to the .com bust.  Companies would go up exponentially based on their idea's and potential.  Investors learned from that and are demanding more these days.  As a result companies that do not show growth potential go down. Companies that show growth and potential (apple and google for 2 easy examples) continue to go up.   Many companies have specific days where employees can buy and sell stocks.  there are minor ripples in the market on these days as the demand and supply are temporarily altered by a large segment of the owner base making trades.  For this reason some companies have a closed pool that is only open to inside trades that then executes the orders over time so that the effect is minimized on the actual stock price.  This is not happening with face book.  Instead many of the investors are dumping their stock directly into the market.  These are savvy investors and if there was potential for profit remaining you would not see the full scale exodus from the stock.  The fact that it is visible is scaring off investors itself.  I can not think of another instance that has gone like facebook, especially one that was called so accurately by many industry pundits. It is in the interest of private owners, stockholders and boards to ensure long-term viability of companies as well. In the case of stockholders and boards, the current price of the stock has its future earning potential priced into the value of the stock. For example, if Microsoft or Google declared that they were shutting down their big research projects, their stock would tumble. Pharmaceutical and chemical companies also have interest in long term viability. They understand that the projects that they start today will not hit the market for another 10 years. If they go bust, all of that money is wasted. There are various exchanges around the world that handle spot precious metal trading; for the most part these are also the primary spot foreign exchange markets, like EBS, Thomson Reuters, Currenex (website seems to be down), etc. You can trade on these markets through brokers just like you can trade on stock markets.  However, the vast majority of traders on these exchanges do not intend to hold any bullion ownership at the end of the day; they want to buy as much as they sell each day.  A minority of traders do intend to hold metal positions for longer periods, but I doubt any of them intend to actually go collect bullion from the exchange.  I don't think it's even possible. Really the only way to get bullion is to pay a service fee to a dealer like you mentioned.  But on an exchange like the ones above you have to pay three different fees: So in the end you can't even get the spot price on the exchanges where the spot prices are determined.  You might even come out ahead by going to a dealer. You should try to find a reputable dealer, and go in knowing the latest trade prices.  An honest dealer will have a website showing you the current trade prices, so you know that they expect you to know the prices when you come in. For example, here's a well-known dealer in Chicago that happily shows you the spot prices from KITCO so you can decide whether their service fee is worth it or not. "I think it's easiest to illustrate it with an example... if you've already read any of the definitions out there, then you know what it means, but just don't understand what it means.  So, we have an ice cream shop. We started it as partners, and now you and I each own 50% of the company. It's doing so well that we decide to take it public.  That means that we will be giving up some of our ownership in return for a chance to own a smaller portion of a bigger thing. With the money that we raise from selling stocks, we're going to open up two more stores.  So, without getting into too much of the nitty gritty accounting that would turn this into a valuation question, let's say we are going to put 30% of the company up for sale with these stocks, leaving you and me with 35% each. We file with the SEC saying we're splitting up the company ownership with 100,000 shares, and so you and I each have 35,000 shares and we sell 30,000 to investors.  Then, and this depends on the state in the US where you're registering your publicly traded corporation, those shares must be assigned a par value that a shareholder can redeem the shares at. Many corporations will use $1 or 10 cents or something nominal.  And we go and find investors who will actually pay us $5 per share for our ice cream shop business. We receive $150,000 in new capital. But when we record that in our accounting, $5 in total capital per share was contributed by investors to the business and is recorded as shareholder's equity. $1 per share (totalling $30,000) goes towards actual shares outstanding, and $4 per share (totalling $120,000) goes towards capital surplus.  These amounts will not change unless we issue new stocks. The share prices on the open market can fluctuate, but we rarely would adjust these. Edit: I couldn't see the table before. DumbCoder has already pointed out the equation Capital Surplus = [(Stock Par Value) + (Premium Per Share)] * (Number of Shares) Based on my example, it's easy to deduce what happened in the case you've given in the table. In 2009 your company XYZ had outstanding Common Stock issued for $4,652. That's probably (a) in thousands, and (b) at a par value of $1 per share. On those assumptions we can say that the company has 4,652,000 shares outstanding for Year End 2009.  Then, if we guess that's the outstanding shares, we can also calculate the implicit average premium per share: 90,946,000 ÷ 4,652,000 == $19.52. Note that this is the average premium per share, because we don't know when the different stocks were issued at, and it may be that the premiums that investors paid were different. Frankly, we don't care.  So clearly since ""Common Stock"" in 2010 is up to $9,303 it means that the company released more stock. Someone else can chime in on whether that means it was specifically a stock split or some other mechanism... it doesn't matter. For understanding this you just need to know that the company put more stock into the marketplace... 9,303 - 4,652 == 4,651(,000) more shares to be exact. With the mechanics of rounding to the thousands, I would guess this was a stock split.  Now. What you can also see is that the Capital Surplus also increased. 232,801 - 90,946 == 141,855. The 4,651,000 shares were issued into the market at an average premium of 141,855 ÷ 4,651 == $30.50. So investors probably paid (or were given by the company) an average of $31.50 at this split.  Then, in 2011 the company had another small adjustment to its shares outstanding. (The Common Stock went up). And there was a corresponding increase in its Capital Surplus.  Without details around the actual stock volumes, it's hard to get more exact. You're also only giving us a portion of the Balance Sheet for your company, so it's hard to go into too much more detail. Hopefully this answers your question though." Value is the key word here. Traders should ideally trade on the perceived future value of a company.  Changes in the perceived future value is what leads them to buy and sell shares. That said, if a company were to have some catastrophe happen (say it and all of its employees and property disappeared)  and somehow every shareholder agreed to not sell, the companies market capitalization would remain unmoved even though the value of the company is gone. So theoretically yes, but it is unlikely. "If a company is doing well, it seems less likely to go bankrupt.  If a company is doing poorly, it seems more likely to go bankrupt.  The problem is, where is the inflection point between ""well"" and ""poorly""?  When does a company start to head into oblivion?  Sometimes it is hard to know.  But if you don't call that right and hold onto your shares when a company is tanking, others, who call it before you do, will sell off, devalue the share price, and now you've missed your chance to get out at a good profit.  If you hang on too long, the company may just go bankrupt and you've lost your investment entirely. A healthy profitability of the company therefore has to bolster investor confidence in avoiding this very unpleasant scenario.  Therefore, the more profitable a company is, the more shareholder confidence it inspires, and the more willing to pay for it in the form of increased share price.  And, this then has a ""meta"" effect, in that each shareholder thinks, ""all other investors think this way, too,"" and so each feels good about holding the stock, since he knows he can likely easily liquidate it for good cash if he needs to, either now or in the next year or sometime hence." Most investors vote with their wallets. I expect ZERO glitches from a trading platform. If someone was actually causing trades to fail maliciously, their reputation would immediately suffer and their business would dry up over night.  You can't just play dumb and not respond to a button click. I can watch and replay the traffic I'm sending out to their server and see if they are responding to verify this. If their system goes down and has no redundancy, that is their fault and opens them to lawsuits. No trading platform could withstand scrutiny from its users if it was dishonest in the scenario you imagine. I don't see how it goes any other way. This is a company for which their entire value proposition is rooted in data security and integrity. That shown to be a farce, what's left? Also, there are direct competitors who weren't affected, which means they aren't uniquely positioned to rebound.  It's not unlike Arthur Andersen. Once your name is tarnished in that kind of an industry, there's not really a road back.