Market liquidity in the context of "Panic of 1907"

Financial services are economic services tied to finance provided by financial institutions. Financial services encompass a broad range of service sector activities, especially as concerns financial management and consumer finance.

The terms finance industry and financial services industry in their most common sense concern commercial banks that provide market liquidity, risk instruments, and brokerage for large public companies and multinational corporations at a macroeconomic scale that impacts domestic politics and foreign relations. The extragovernmental power and scale of the finance industry remains an ongoing controversy in many industrialized Western economies, as seen in the American Occupy Wall Street civil protest movement of 2011.

A financial asset is a non-physical asset whose value is derived from a contractual claim, such as bank deposits, bonds, and participations in companies' share capital. Financial assets are usually more liquid than tangible assets, such as commodities or real estate.

The opposite of financial assets is non-financial assets, which include both tangible property (sometimes also called real assets) such as land, real estate or commodities, and intangible assets such as intellectual property, including copyrights, patents, trademarks and data.

A hedge fund is a pooled investment fund that holds liquid assets and that makes use of complex trading and risk management techniques to aim to improve investment performance and insulate returns from market risk. Among these portfolio techniques are short selling and the use of leverage and derivative instruments. In the United States, financial regulations require that hedge funds be marketed only to institutional investors and high-net-worth individuals.

Hedge funds are considered alternative investments. Their ability to use leverage and more complex investment techniques distinguishes them from regulated investment funds available to the retail market, commonly known as mutual funds and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). They are also considered distinct from private equity funds and other similar closed-end funds as hedge funds generally invest in relatively liquid assets and are usually open-ended. This means they typically allow investors to invest and withdraw capital periodically based on the fund's net asset value, whereas private-equity funds generally invest in illiquid assets and return capital only after a number of years. Other than a fund's regulatory status, there are no formal or fixed definitions of fund types, and so there are different views of what can constitute a "hedge fund".

Over-the-counter (OTC) or off-exchange trading or pink sheet trading is done directly between two parties, without the supervision of an exchange. It is contrasted with exchange trading, which occurs via exchanges. A stock exchange has the benefit of facilitating liquidity, providing transparency, and maintaining the current market price. In an OTC trade, the price is not necessarily publicly disclosed.

OTC trading, as well as exchange trading, occurs with commodities, financial instruments (including stocks), and derivatives of such products. Products traded on traditional stock exchanges, and other regulated bourse platforms, must be well standardized. This means that exchanged deliverables match a narrow range of quantity, quality, and identity which is defined by the exchange and identical to all transactions of that product. This is necessary for there to be transparency in stock exchange-based equities trading.

Liquidity is a concept in economics involving the convertibility of assets and obligations. It can include:

• Market liquidity, the ease with which an asset can be sold
• Accounting liquidity, the ability to meet cash obligations when due
• Funding liquidity, the availability of credit to finance the purchase of financial asset
• Liquid capital, the amount of money that a firm holds
• Liquidity risk, the risk that an asset will have impaired market liquidity

In accounting, insolvency is the state of being unable to pay the debts, by a person or company (debtor), at maturity; those in a state of insolvency are said to be insolvent. There are two forms: cash-flow insolvency and balance-sheet insolvency.

Cash-flow insolvency is when a person or company has enough assets to pay what is owed, but does not have the appropriate form of payment. For example, a person may own a large house and a valuable car, but not have enough liquid assets to pay a debt when it falls due. Cash-flow insolvency can usually be resolved by negotiation. For example, the bill collector may wait until the car is sold and the debtor agrees to pay a penalty.

Alternative trading system (ATS) is a US and Canadian regulatory term for a non-exchange trading venue that matches buyers and sellers to find counterparties for transactions. Alternative trading systems are typically regulated as broker-dealers rather than as exchanges (although an alternative trading system can apply to be regulated as a securities exchange). In general, for regulatory purposes, an alternative trading system is an organization or system that provides or maintains a market place or facilities for bringing together purchasers and sellers of securities, but does not set rules for subscribers (other than rules for the conduct of subscribers trading on the system). An ATS must be approved by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and is an alternative to a traditional stock exchange. The equivalent term under European legislation is a multilateral trading facility (MTF).

These venues play an important role in public markets for allowing alternative means of accessing liquidity. They can be used for trading large blocks of shares away from the normal exchange, a practice that could otherwise skew the market price in a particular direction, depending on a security's market capitalization and trading volume. ATSs are generally electronic but don't have to be. ATSs can be distinguished from electronic communication networks (ECNs), which are a "fully electronic subset of ATSs that automatically and anonymously match orders".