Fundamental understanding of the stock markets

The basic purpose of stock market is to enable stock buyers and sellers to transact shares among them. A promoter is a individual or group that promotes the company and they may issue shares to prospective buyers through a process called IPO in which they give a fractional stake of the company to each successful IPO applicant. The owner of the share (or shareholder) cannot claim the refund from the company, however they can sell the shares in secondary market based on current valuation. The share holders do not have a direct say in how the company is run. The day to day company operations is run by the CEO or Director (or ship of the captain) whose primary objective is to return value to the shareholders through company’s business operations.
Shares have a face value which is determined based on the company’s capital and number of shares issued. Typically shares are sold in primary and secondary market at a premium which determines the stock price in the market.
India has two primary stock markets ie. BSE and NSE. They have a index respectively called as SENSEX and NIFTY. These are indexes based on the average performance of the top (30 for BSE and 50 for NSE) companies on the exchanges.