History

Trading itself is old, older than any exchange. People have swapped goods and promises of future goods for about as long as there’s been anything worth swapping. What people usually mean by “the history of trading” is closer to when it became formal and organized, and that’s a more recent story. Where it started The Amsterdam Stock Exchange, founded in 1602 to trade shares in the Dutch East India Company, is usually credited as the first genuine stock exchange, and it set a template that every exchange since has followed in some form: a fixed place to trade, shares that could be bought and sold by anyone, and prices posted publicly for everyone to see. ...

History of Trading covers the pit era and why it eventually ran into its own limits. This is what replaced it, and the bottleneck of physical floor trading was solved gradually rather than all at once. The first electronic markets NASDAQ launched in 1971 as the first electronic stock market, and it didn’t have a trading floor at all, just a network of dealers quoting prices on screens. Other exchanges resisted for decades, because a lot of money and status was tied up in owning a physical seat on a traditional floor, but the advantages of electronic matching, speed, lower cost, and the ability to trade from anywhere, eventually made the pit model impossible to defend commercially. ...