Evolution of the Stock Exchange

Paul Arlman, Secretary General of the Federation of European Securities Exchanges, warned in the following excerpted speech that he would not be able to answer this question ..... him: "What is an Exchange?"

The New York Stock Exchange was originally formed to ..... exchange rooms for the convenient transaction of their business by its members.

The oldest Stock Exchange in the world, the Amsterdam Exchange, started in a Post Office in 1598 where incoming and ..... letters from ships were registered.

But is was only in 1611, nine years after they started trading the first tradable share of the Vereenigde Oost-indische Compagnie (VOC) that they really got their own Exchange in the ..... of a building.

"Confusion de Confusiones", by Joseph de la Vega, published in 1688, shows us quite precisely what an Exchange is: a den of ..... unless moderated by regulation.

Through most of its history an Exchange was a meeting place in a physical sense, and only in the last century did we introduce electricity and telephones, which on many floors of the Exchanges were restricted or ......

In order to define what a Stock Exchange is today, you have to understand the unstoppable progress, or ....., of technology.

When the computer did away with the physical limitation of the Exchange within one single city or region, the technology lost its uniqueness, and it gave rise to ......

Another factor for change has been international equity investors, who have shown a ferocious appetite for both domestic and foreign equity investment, even ..... the dot com bubble.

The fourth factor is the information availability explosion that gave all investors nearly ..... access to nearly free data.