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Stock Market Quiz

What were the five oldest stock exchanges worldwide?

Antwerp Bourse 1460
Lyons Bourse 1506
Toulouse Bourse 1549
Hamburg Bourse 1558
London Royal Exchange 1571

 

What were the three oldest stock exchanges in the US?

 

Philadelphia Stock Exchange 1790
New York Stock Exchange 1792
Boston Stock Exchange 1834

 

What were the three oldest commodities exchanges in the US?

Chicago Board of Trade 1848
Kansas City Board of Trade 1856
New York Cotton Exchange 1870

 

What were the first publicly traded securities in the U.S.?

$80 million in U.S. Government bonds that were issued in 1790 to refinance Revolutionary War debt.

When where the beginnings of the New York Stock Exchange established and what was the name of the founding document?

In 1792, the Buttonwood Agreement, signed by twenty-four brokers and merchants on Wall Street, agreeing to trade securities on a common commission basis.

What was the first listed company on the New York Stock Exchange?

Bank of New York, which was the first corporate stock traded under the Buttonwood tree in 1792, and the first listed company on the NYSE.

Who were the 24 brokers who signed the “Buttonwood Agreement” on May 17, 1792, and became the first New York Stock Exchange members? Leonard Bleecker , Hugh Smith , Armstrong & Barnewall , Samuel March , Bernard Hart , Alexander Zuntz , Andrew D. Barclay , Sutton & Hardy , Benjamin Seixas , John Henry , John A. Hardenbrook , Samuel Beebe , Benjamin Winthrop , John Ferrers , Ephraim Hart , Isaac M. Gomez , Gulian McEvers , Augustine H. Lawrence , G. N. Bleecker , John Bush , Peter Anspach , Charles McEvers, Jr. , David Reedy , Robinson & Hartshorne 

“The Stock Market is Rigged!”

Once upon a time in the late 1700′s, there were two types of sonofabitches trading the earliest version of securities in Lower Manhattan: There were the auctioneer sonofabitches and there were the merchant sonofabitches.

The auctioneers were all-powerful and totally destructive at times. They presided over trade, which took place outside under a Buttonwood Tree on Wall Street. What the auctioneers did that was most maddening to the rest of the participants in these protozoic markets was charge exorbitant commissions and allow for securities to trade in a lawless fashion, without regard for fairness of any kind.

Meanwhile, the cutthroat speculators were growing to be quite fed up with this arrangement so they did what all would-be conspirators do – they met in secret to plot an overthrow. In March of 1792, twenty four of these merchant sonofabitches snuck into the Corre’s Hotel, which occupied what is now 68 Wall Street (which has since been absorbed into 40 Wall Street, aka the Trump Building), for their clandestine sitdown.

Two months later, they hatched their scheme, signing a document called the Buttonwood Agreement (at left), named for the tree they’d been wheeling and dealing under each day. The accord meant that all twenty four signers were bound to trade securities only amongst each other, to deny entry into their clique to outsiders who’d not been accepted by the membership and to fix commissions on trades at a set amount (.25% of face value for all shares of stock or similar instrument). This banding together made these twenty four large-scale merchant sonofabitches into the de facto monopoly that controlled all trade and it sent the other sonofabitches, the auctioneers, out of business. (more…)