Amsterdam was the first city in the world with an active stock market. In some respects, it was a minor market, with a small number of participants and few publicly-traded shares. However, the practices of participants and the instruments with which they traded would be surprisingly familiar to us today. Documenting the functioning of…
When Hungarian industry was struggling to secure enough capital to maintain its efficiency, the communist government was looking for ways to raise investment capital. Freeing up financial markets became a priority and before the end of the 1980s, a socialist economy in Central Europe had a bond market and a stock market. They started…
Starting from the late 19th century, many new mining companies were introduced to the financial markets in Canada. They looked to secure money from investors in Toronto and Montreal in order to explore and develop mines elsewhere in the country. However, investments in mining companies, especially those engaged mostly in exploration, are very risky…
For the entirety of the 19th century, Paris had two stock exchanges. One was the official Paris Bourse, relatively well-regulated and selective in its listing of securities. The other was an unregulated market called the Coulisse. The Paris market was big enough for both exchanges and perhaps needed both of them, in contrast to the…
Stock exchanges usually follow, rather than lead, fundamental developments in a country’s financial system. Indeed, up until the late 20th century, relatively few countries even had a single stock exchange. One of these recent introductions to the workings of a stock exchange occurred in Iraq with the founding of the Iraq Stock Exchange very soon…
Many credit the financial development of the United Kingdom as a cause of the Industrial Revolution which got underway there in the late 18th century. Of course, stock exchanges may have had their own role to play in funding industry. However, it was not the London Stock Exchange that filled this role, either alone or…
Agricultural commodities have been traded between places for millennia before modern commodity exchanges were founded. However, these exchanges brought many of the services required by merchants and traders under a single roof. In the 19th century, exchanges became larger, partly the result of improved communications and transportation infrastructure. Two American commodities exchanges formed in the…
Stock exchanges are physical testaments to financial development. Their buildings are often prominent within their home cities. They evidence commercial success, perhaps even heralding more forthcoming success. They help fund growing industries and the firms within them, the purveyors of future riches. Just the same though, new industries have also helped form new stock exchanges,…
According to the most common accounts, the first stock exchange was established in Amsterdam following the initial public offering of the Dutch East India Company in 1602. However, Amsterdam was not the first city to earn the distinction of being a financial center. It was, after all, hardly the first time traders gathered in a…
Published almost a hundred years ago now, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefèvre is more than an investment book. It is something of a novel, set in fin de siècle New York and revolving around a certain stock trader named Larry Livingston. This Larry Livingston did not exist, at least by that name,…
