Finance History | Nieuwe Brug, Amsterdam, 1602 — The First Stock Market Met on a Wooden Bridge

For its first nine years the busiest share market in the world had no building. It had a bridge. Amsterdam's city council had designated the Nieuwe Brug, the northernmost bridge over the Damrak, as the place for merchants to meet in 1561. Before that they had gathered outside their own houses in the Warmoesstraat and blocked one of the city's main streets doing it. From 1586 the authorities let them shelter in St Olaf's Chapel, a short walk away, when the weather was bad. That was still the arrangement when the Dutch East India Company was chartered in 1602. Merchants stood on the bridge and dealt in grain, salt, timber and bills of exchange, and when VOC shares became transferable they were dealt on the bridge too. Nobody decided this. The company did not designate a place for its shares to be traded, and neither did the city. The share trade simply attached itself to the spot where merchants already stood, because the chance of finding somebody who wanted the other side of your trade was highest where the most people were. Liquidity went to the crowd, and the crowd was on the bridge. The men doing it were not specialists either. They were the same merchants who spent every day negotiating cargoes and bills, and a share was one more thing to haggle over. In 1607 the council decided the city needed a proper exchange building, and in August 1611 the Beurs van Hendrick de Keyser opened over the Rokin, south of the Dam. A bylaw declared that deals struck outside it were void in court, which tells you how firmly the habit of trading in the street had to be broken. The bridge is still there, carrying traffic over the Damrak at the harbour end. What is not there is the water it was built for. The open harbour in the cover painting was progressively filled and built over, and Amsterdam Centraal now stands opposite on an artificial island raised in the nineteenth century, so the view a share trader had in 1605 no longer exists in any direction. Cover image: Jan Abrahamsz Beerstraaten, The Paalhuis and the Nieuwe Brug at Amsterdam in Winter, Rijksmuseum SK-A-20, CC0. The Paalhuis on the left was the harbour toll house. The painting dates from the 1650s or 1660s, a generation after the share trade had moved indoors, but the bridge and the crowd on it are the same. Coordinates 52.376830, 4.898767, resolved by Nominatim for the Nieuwe Brug itself. Accurate to about 15 m. St Olaf's Chapel, the bad-weather alternative, is roughly 150 m east at the corner of the Zeedijk.