What is the meaning of Exchange?

Exchange is an exchange is a physical location for trading securities, typically by using what's known as an open outcry or auction system. In the US, for example, stocks are traded on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), the largest stock exchange in the world, on the American Stock Exchange (AMEX), a division of the NASDAQ-Amex Market Group, and on smaller regional exchanges in Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia, and on the Pacific Exchangein California. Futures contracts and options are traded on exchanges in Chicago, Kansas City, Minneapolis, New York, and Philadelphia. Increasingly, however, trading also takes place on electronic markets, including the NASDAQ Stock Market (Nasdaq), which allow brokers to trade by computer from any location. The term exchange also describes moving assets from one mutual fund to another in the same fund family, or from one variable annuity subaccount to another offered through the same contract.