Market History
The market did not begin with your brokerage app. This exhibit walks four centuries of it, from the first tradable share in 1602 to the first speculative mania, the crashes that rewrote the rules, and the records still being set today.
7 artifacts · Drawn from financial-history records and market data. Each artifact links to its own sourced page.
The stock market is more than 400 years old. In 1602 the Dutch East India Company began issuing tradable paper shares, creating the Amsterdam exchange — the world’s first modern stock market, and a direct ancestor of today’s Euronext.
The first great stock bubble burst three centuries ago. In 1720 shares of Britain’s South Sea Company shot from around £100 to nearly £1,000 in a matter of months, then collapsed back toward £100 by year-end — ruining thousands of investors.
The New York Stock Exchange began under a buttonwood tree. Twenty-four brokers signed the Buttonwood Agreement on Wall Street in 1792; the board that grew out of it was known as the New York Stock & Exchange Board until 1863, when it took the name it carries today.
On Black Monday — October 19, 1987 — the Dow fell 22.6% in a single day, still its worst one-day percentage drop ever. No single piece of news fully explains it.
In the 2010 "Flash Crash," the U.S. stock market lost roughly a trillion dollars of value in minutes — then recovered most of it before the day was over.
In 2024 NVIDIA briefly became the most valuable public company in the world, overtaking Apple and Microsoft — driven almost entirely by demand for its AI chips.
Two calendar quirks have held up for decades. September has been the weakest month for U.S. stocks on average since 1950 — the only month with a consistently negative long-run return — while October is the most volatile, home to the crashes of 1929, 1987, and 2008.