1.2 Capital and markets

Most of the ideas discussed in this course derive from one particular model of the society called capitalism. At the core lies an idea that capital (indeed any kind of asset such as money, raw material, even patents) owned by an individual (the investor) can be lent to another (the entrepreneur) to produce a certain number of goods or services. The separation of roles played by the owner and producer is not granted for example in feudal, communist or family based societies, where the suzerain, the state or the father respectively are as much the owners as the chief producers of goods. With no implied judgment for choosing one particular model, this separation of interests does however lead to a number of interesting characteristics:

1. Entrepreneurs with little resources but good ideas can realize projects for the larger benefit of the society and are rewarded for their work with a regular income.
2. Investors have an independent judgment of what they consider good ideas, which reduces the likelihood that powerful individuals with bad ideas allocate large resources to realize projects that have little but self-interest.
3. Investors have an interest in putting their wealth to work for the larger benefit of the society and will sometimes make a profit.
4. The mutual interest and also the competition between investors and entrepreneurs can, via regulations, be used to maximize the efficiency of reaching certain goals the society wants to pursue - such as the growth in the gross domestic product (GDP) that measures the total amount of goods produced in a country.

An important feature of capitalism is the markets, where investors exchange standardized assets in the form of securities, for a market price (the spot price) that is openly disclosed to all the participants in the market. Examples include the well known stock markets (such as the New York Stock Exchange NYSE, the European Virtual Exchange VTX) and less well know exchanges (such as the New York Mercantile Exchange NYMEX, the New York Commodity Exchange COMEX, or the Chicago Board of Trade CBOT) where raw material are traded (such as cattle, oil, gold).

The spot price of a security depends on the consensus reached via offer and demand from the sellers and the buyers: if everything goes well for the investors, it slowly drifts in time at a rate that reflects the growing value of this security. Uncertainties in the valuation lead to different opinions and are the source of price fluctuations: quantified as the standard deviation of normalized increments measured over a period of time, the fluctuations are called volatility and play a central role in the description of any security. Combining the effects from drift and volatility, the spot prices are said to evolve in a stochastic manner, i.e. they never follow any quite predictable pattern: rather, they look like the random walk that was first described in biology, when Brown observed the motion of small particles under a microscope and is illustrated with horizontal motions in the VMARKET applet below.