Who Created the Stock Market?
Overview According to B. Mark Smith, author of “A History of the Global Stock Market,” government debt obligations were bought and sold in 14th century Italian city-states. In “The Wheels of Commerce,” French historian Fernand Braudel concluded that the available evidence “points to the Mediterranean as the cradle of the stock market.” While the contemporary stock market concept’s precise origins are ambiguous, the practice of trading financial instruments indisputably took flight centuries ago. Stock markets have slowly but surely matured into the diverse and complex international trading venues that we know today. Paper Trading Founded in 1602, the Amsterdam Stock Exchange—now the Euronext Amsterdam—traded physical securities, which buyers and sellers could literally handle. This paper trading was trendsetting. The exchange maintains possession of original stock certificates from that period and can justifiably stake claim as the first genuine stock market. These pioneering stock
