Who keeps track of all the shares that are traded and held?

Think about Microsoft Corporation. They have like 9 billion shares. Each share is owned by someone. Some computer must keep track of who owns what or otherwise we wouldn't know who's the owner of the shares.





There are thousands of stocks and trillions of shares in existence, and theoretically, each share could have a single owner. During a regular business day, billions of shares change owners. Every single transaction (date, time, number of shares traded and the price) is recorded somewhere and broadcasted over the internet, so others can get


real-time quotes and historical quotes and charts for each stock...





Some kind of super computer must be working in the background to keep track of who owns what or else the stock market would not work. So, my question is where is all this information stored and what kind of computer is responsible for handling all this important data and making the stock market work? How is it possible for this huge system to work so smoothly? Explain plz.|||Each Financial Institution.





If you have a brokerage account at Wells Fargo then they have your information.





You are right, there 9 billion shares of Microsoft in the Planet but Wells Fargo only handles 0.01% of them with a regular $999 Dell Personal Computer.





If you have a brokerage account at Bank of America then they will have your private information and the same case applies.





There are thousands of banks all over the World and each one of them has a few thousands of Microsoft shares.





When you sell your Microsoft share to me Wells Fargo reduces the number of shares in your brokerage account from 1 to 0 and it only takes a nanosecond.





In contrast, the number of shares of Microsoft increases in my brokerage account from 0 to 1 and it only takes a nanosecond.





There is a middle man between Wells Fargo (Your bank) and Zecco (My broker)





In this case, the middle man is the NASDAQ.