History

Trading itself is older than any exchange, older than money in most tellings, wherever two people looked at what the other was holding and decided a swap made sense for both of them. What people usually mean by “the history of trading” is really the story of when that swapping got formal, and that’s a more recent and better-documented one. 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 the limits it eventually ran into. This is what replaced it, and the change happened in stages rather than overnight. The first electronic markets NASDAQ launched in 1971 as the first electronic stock market, and there was no floor to picture at all, just a network of dealers quoting prices on screens hundreds of miles apart. 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. ...