Planning for Expansion:Assessing Financial Development in target markets - Essay Example

8 countries selected for measure of financial markets development include, UK, USA, China, Egypt, Vietnam, Colombia, Rwanda and Kenya. The first 4 selected countries are amongst the developed nations and have quite well developed financial markets. The other 4 economies are fairly developing nations and have not as old financial markets as the first 4 and therefore it is expected that they have a wide potential for growth and improvement in their financial markets. Depth. Market depth means that the market is able to sustain large market orders without impacting on price security.

This therefore considers overall level and breath of open orders and usually refers to trading within an individual security. This explains why many of the public stocks traded in stock exchanges have numerous shares so that a large number of the shares are traded every day without having unexplainable price fluctuation. Market depth is related to volume and liquidity. The volume of the instrument should be large and the share should be liquid, that is, having a relatively cheap exchangeable price.

Market depth measure include private credit as a percentage of GDP for financial institutions and stock market capitalization to GDP for stock markets.In the above countries, the USA offers a more deep financial market with a number of stock markets that exchange equities, foreign exchange and derivatives; and also more private placement as percentage of GDP. New York stock exchange has the world’s largest stock exchange by market capitalization. Shanghai stock exchange is the 6th largest by market capitalization.

Rwanda is the country with the least deep financial market exchanging only 5 equity stocks traded. Market Acess. Direct Market Acess refers to the electronic facilities provided by independent firms that allows the investors to access liquidity for the securities they wish to buy or sell. This links