Amsterdam Stock Exchange

Shares of the Dutch East India Company began trading in Amsterdam in 1602. It is often called the world's first official stock exchange.

Context

The Dutch East India Company, known by its Dutch initials VOC, was formed in 1602 by merging several trading ventures. Rather than raising money for a single voyage, it sold shares that gave investors a stake in the company as an ongoing business.

Those shares could be bought and sold in Amsterdam, which gave rise to an active market with brokers and, according to historians, early forms of futures and options trading. This is why Amsterdam is often credited with the first formal stock exchange, although earlier markets for debt and bonds existed in Italian cities and elsewhere, and 'first' depends on definition.

The VOC became one of the most powerful trading firms of its era, with a legal monopoly on Dutch trade in Asia, and it operated until it was dissolved at the end of the 1700s. Its shares and records are often used to explain how modern corporations began.

The exchange mattered because it showed that ordinary investors could pool money into a long-lived enterprise, an idea that underlies the way public companies are financed today.