Even in finance terms, an archipelago can mean what it usually means: a group of islands...like the kind where billionaires might spend luxury vacations or take advantage of a friendly banking system to avoid taxes.
However, the name Archipelago (with the capital "a") has a specialized finance meaning as well. It is the name of a particular electronic communications network, or ECN...a kind of computerized stock information and trading network. Founded in the late 1990s, Archipelago helped pioneer the ECN space.
In the early 2000s, Archipelago had expanded to become an electronic exchange, allowing computerized trading of stocks listed on places like the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ. It became popular with both retail day traders and financial institutions, who preferred its low-cost, high-speed features, compared to traditional exchanges, like the NYSE, which still relied heavily on guys in ugly jackets yelling at each other.
The NYSE eventually grew tired of the competition and merged with Archipelago in 2006, creating the NYSE Arca.
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Finance: What is an Institutional Invest...1 Views
Finance a la shmoop what is an institutional investor? institution think
mutual fund company like fidelity or Wellington or State Street or Blackrock [Mutual fund companies appear]
also think hedge fund think giant pension fund or even a small one the
"institutional" part of this term means that the investor is a
professional they've likely gone to grad school taken a bunch of licensing exams
are really good at math and accounting good at poker probably as well [Person checks cards on poker table]
apprenticed with old people who mumble through chewed cigars about what the IPO
of Ford was like with Henry that whippersnapper and those investors are
professionally responsible for managing OPM other people's money standards are
higher when you lose someone else's money versus your own
well the institution behind them raises and retains the dough which is they then [Investor receives cash]
invest often in large chunks and their viewed as a different class by many
because unlike the cardiologists investor Club of Northeast Milwaukee
these investors actually understand the risks they're taking when they invest so [Men stood outside cardiologist investor club sign]
if a given stock shows tens of thousands of hundreds share trades odds are good
that cardiologists and their friends are buying in on tips they got from the golf
course if the trade blocks are in hunks of a hundred thousand or a million [Stocks in a sack of million shares]
shares each per block that is odds are good that well these are schooled
institutions buying and selling shares with a presumption that the
institutional investors will generally know what they're doing or at least more
so than the you know non institutional getting there so why would you want to
be an institutional investor? answer = bank if you're good and very very few people [Man discussing institutional investors]
actually are but if you are one of the vaunted few the proud the knowledgeable
who beats the market regularly in good markets and bad and can do it at scale
on hundreds of millions or billions of dollars invested well then you can
expect to make tens of millions of dollars a year [Man throws cash into the air]
shepherding the wealth of the wealthy or at least of
masses collecting your fees and whining about taxes until the cows come home [Cows appear on a field]
when did they leave anyway?
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