SECURITY
12 May 2016 By PDSNETA "catch-all" term for all types of paper assets which can be traded on an organized exchange or over-the-counter. Thus the term securities includes stocks, shares or debentures (issued by a company having a share capital), notes, units of stock issued in place of shares and options on the above or options on indices of information as issued by a stock exchange on prices of any of the aforementioned instruments. The term is much broader than "share", encompassing all types of investments, which can be readily bought or sold - but shares are often called "securities". Today, most securities are dematerialized - which means that they are not represented by any physical document, but rather a record on a database. Thus listed shares today simply consist of an electronic record on the STRATE database.
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