Player 1 - The Banker

Why do I start with Banker being the player number 1? Probably because I am myself one :-)

Anyways, a Banker is probably one of the most important player in the market. There are different kinds of Bankers who are trying to do different things in the market.

1. Retail Banker - These are the guys who service individual clients like you and me. Apart from providing us loans and coming out with various deposit schemes they also provide few services like "Demat" accounts, which are critical for the market to function well.

What's "Demat"? Demat stands for "De-materialized" shares. Until few years ago shares were available only in the physical form. Which means when you buy the shares of a company, you will get them in the form of physical certificates. You can well imagine the pains of handling physical share certificates. They get stolen, its difficult to transfer them, they get soiled....

That's when the concept of "Demat" originated. A Demat account is very much like a normal bank account, the only difference being it has shares instead of cash. So if you buy shares your Demat account gets credited with those shares and if you sell them, it gets debited from your account.

Of course, we have other kinds of bankers.. Will cover them in the next post