Stock market

The stock market is the collective term for all the buying and selling of publicly listed company shares, across every exchange where that trading happens. People often use it loosely to mean "how stocks are doing overall" on a given day, usually judged by a broad index.

The stock market is not one single thing in one place, it is the sum of activity across exchanges, brokers, and the millions of buy and sell orders investors place every day. When people say the stock market went up or down, they generally mean a major index moved, not that every single stock moved the same way.