A clearing house is an intermediary between buyers and sellers of financial instruments. Further, it is an agency or separate corporation of a futures exchange responsible for settling trading accounts, clearing trades, collecting and maintaining margin monies, regulating delivery, and reporting trading data.
All the world's 10 most valuable companies, including Alphabet, Apple (AAPL) and Microsoft (MSFT), are based in the U.S., according to a USA TODAY analysis of data from S&P Capital IQ based on the S&P Global 1200 index. Alphabet's rise to No. 1 with a market value Tuesday of $554.8 billion is a historic moment.
Analysts were expecting earnings of $8.09 on $20.8 billion in revenue. And with that, Alphabet became the most valuable publicly-traded company in the world â coming in at a market cap $558 billion after jumping about 8% after the company reported its fourth-quarter earnings, and passing Apple, which sits at a market cap of $535 billion.