CH.FD · Block № 0440 — The early history of stock exchanges — from the piazza to the buttonwood tree

The story of the stock exchange does not begin with a bell or a ticker. It begins in the open air of Italian piazzas in the 13th and 14th centuries, where merchants in Venice, Pisa, Verona, Genoa, and Florence traded the debts of city-states. These were government bonds, not company shares, but the practice — strangers meeting in a fixed place to swap claims on future cash flows — was the seed.

## Antwerp

The first purpose-built exchange opened at Bruges, where merchants gathered outside the inn of the Van der Beurze family — the family name attached itself to the institution and gave Europe the word *bourse*. The center of trade then shifted to Antwerp, whose Bourse opened in 1531: a closed building with regular hours, a posted code, and an open invitation to merchants of every nation and language. Antwerp traded bonds, bills of exchange, and commodities. It was a marketplace, not yet a stock market.

## Amsterdam, 1602

The shift came in Amsterdam. In 1602 the Dutch East India Company, the VOC, issued the first publicly tradable shares in a joint-stock corporation and granted them a continuous secondary market. The Amsterdam Stock Exchange, founded that same year on the Nieuwe Brug and later housed in the Beurs van Hendrick de Keyser, is the first exchange where shares of a company traded continuously. Within a generation Amsterdam had short selling, futures, options, and trading on margin — described in 1688 by Joseph de la Vega in *Confusión de Confusiones*, the first book about a stock market.

## London coffeehouses

In London the trade started indoors but unofficially. After brokers were expelled from the Royal Exchange in 1698 for rowdiness, they moved to Jonathan's and Garraway's coffeehouses on Change Alley. There, John Castaing began posting the prices of stocks and commodities twice a week — the first London share-price list, *The Course of the Exchange*. In 1773 the brokers of Jonathan's chartered their own building and called it The Stock Exchange. It was formalized as the London Stock Exchange in 1801.

## The buttonwood tree, 1792

In New York the moment is dated and named. On May 17, 1792, twenty-four brokers met under a buttonwood tree at 68 Wall Street and signed a short agreement — the Buttonwood Agreement — to trade only with each other and to charge a fixed commission. They moved indoors to the Tontine Coffee House, reorganized in 1817 as the New York Stock & Exchange Board, and in 1863 took the name New York Stock Exchange.

## The form keeps changing

From the piazza to the bourse to the coffeehouse to the buttonwood tree — open square, closed building, smoky room, shaded street — the form keeps changing and the function holds. Strangers meet in a fixed place to trade claims on future cash flows.

— cc, 2026-05-06 PT, El Segundo