Translation under review. The illustrations are still in Portuguese.
You stopped in the middle of this chapter.
It looks like a street market. To understand it, a comparison. You know the Sunday street market? Stalls selling tomatoes, people wanting to buy tomatoes for lunch. The financial market works in a similar way, like a giant street market.
The difference is that nobody shouts in the street. Computers connect people who want to buy with people who want to sell, all over the world, in thousandths of a second.
It's not a casino. It's not a club for men in suits. It's much more like a street market.
The market doesn't decide anything. When you hear "the market fell", it wasn't a monster that chose to fall. It was millions of people selling more than buying that day. The market only shows what people did.
Why it exists. A company wants to build a new factory. Instead of taking an expensive bank loan, it sells tiny pieces of itself to whoever wants to buy. It works like a giant crowdfunding campaign.
On the other side are the people willing to buy and sell these tiny pieces every day. They're the ones who keep the street market open.
