The Dutch East India Company (VOC) needs money for expensive, risky expeditions to Asia. Such voyages used to be financed with one-trip stakes: the ship came back, the backers split the profit and went their separate ways. VOC does something nobody had done before: capital becomes permanent, and stakes become shares that can be sold to another investor without waiting for the company to end. That's the birth of the share in the modern sense. The oldest surviving share is dated 1606. Two years later, rebel shareholder Isaac Le Maire forms a secret syndicate and bets against the price — the first coordinated short attack in history. In 1610 the authorities respond with the first ever official ban on short selling.
The first regulator didn't target buyers' greed — it targeted sellers of nothing. The fight over banning short selling is a century and a half older than the United States.
Short attacks are alive today: GameStop, 2021 — station 12.
beursgeschiedenis.nl · worldsfirststockexchange.com
The South Sea Company in London gets a crown monopoly on trade with South America and essentially converts government debt into its own shares — the scheme itself fuels demand. In parallel, in Paris, the Scotsman John Law issues shares in the Mississippi Company on similar logic, backed by paper money from his own bank. Both stories send share prices up 8x in a few months — and crash them to zero, dragging down Law's bank and the reputation of paper money in France for decades. That same year, 1720, the Dutch publish an album of satirical prints, "Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid" ("The Great Mirror of Folly") — over 70 caricatures of speculators.
Among those wiped out was Isaac Newton (~£20,000). His famous line about calculating the motion of the heavens but not the madness of crowds is most likely a later legend.
A bubble doesn't need the internet. A crowd and a story about a "new era" are enough.
the Newton quote — likely a later legend
In Tokugawa-era Japan, rice isn't just food — it's the de facto currency: samurai stipends are measured in koku of rice, and harvest swings throw the whole economy around. The Dōjima Rice Exchange in Osaka gets official status — the world's first organized futures market: traders deal not in rice, but in vouchers, promises to deliver rice in the future. Legendary trader Munehisa Homma builds his fortune studying not just harvests but the psychology of merchants — he's said to have run a network of flag-signal observers relaying news between cities faster than ordinary couriers.
"Homma invented the candlestick chart" is a beautiful legend: candlesticks took their modern form in Japan only by the late 19th century, and the West only learned of them in 1991, from Steve Nison.
Tap — the "proto-record" of rice prices morphs into a modern candlestick.
Homma's candlesticks — the 18th-century invention story isn't confirmed
24 brokers agree to trade only with each other under a buttonwood tree on Wall Street — a fixed 0.25% commission, no dealing with outside auctioneers. The agreement fit in a single paragraph — the "Buttonwood Agreement" — and needed neither a building, nor a license, nor state approval: the exchange wasn't built by the state, it's a cartel of street brokers who decided to trade on their own terms. At first the brokers literally meet under that same tree, or at the nearby Tontine Coffee House — an actual building wouldn't appear for decades.
The agreement fit in a single paragraph and needed neither a building nor a license.
0.25% commission then — 0.00% at today's brokers. Who pays for your trade now? The answer is in chapter 11 (PFOF/HFT).
Edward Calahan launches the stock ticker on November 15, 1867 — quotes leave the exchange floor for the first time and run over wires to brokers' offices across the city. Young inventor Thomas Edison improves the device so much that in 1869 he sells the patent for the "Universal Stock Ticker" for $40,000 — huge money that lets him open his first real lab, in New Jersey. Spent paper tape becomes confetti — that's how ticker-tape parades are born, a tradition that will outlive the ticker itself by over a century.
In the crash of October 29, 1929, volume is so heavy the tape runs hours behind — people sold without knowing current prices. Today the same race plays out in microseconds.
Slider: how long a quote took from New York to London — 1830: weeks, 1866: minutes, today: 60 ms.
Dow Jones −89% over three years — the start of the Great Depression. The crash doesn't happen in a single day: on October 24, "Black Thursday," the panic is so severe that a group of top Wall Street bankers publicly buys up blue-chip shares on the floor to stop the slide — and for a few days it works. But on October 28 and 29 ("Black Monday" and "Black Tuesday") the selling returns, this time with no rescuers. REPLAY: you're in New York, September 3, 1929, the index at an all-time high. What happens next is up to you.
The tale of the shoeshine boy giving Joseph Kennedy stock tips is the symbol of a crowd at its peak: when everyone's talking about the market, it's too late to buy.
−12.8% on October 28, −11.7% on October 29, bottom at −198.69 on November 13.
the shoeshine boy — a period tale, but the indicator is real
Wikimedia Commons · Associated Press (public domain)
On February 8, 1971, NASDAQ — the National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations — starts trading as the world's first fully electronic stock market. It has no floor, no brokers in suits shouting prices: over 2,500 securities are quoted through a computer network of dealers updating bid and ask prices from their own terminals. The system is built by the Bunker Ramo company. The goal was practical — to replace the over-the-counter market's scattered phone quotes with a single electronic feed. But in effect it's the first step toward a world where the price is born not on a floor, but on a network.
At launch NASDAQ isn't a trade-execution exchange but a quotation system — the trades themselves were still made by phone between dealers for a long time. Fully electronic execution wouldn't arrive for decades, but the principle that price lives on the network, not the floor, was already set.
Half a century later, HFT — trading at the microsecond level — will grow on this exact electronic architecture (chapter 11).
On October 19, 1987, the Dow Jones falls 508.32 points — 22.61% in a single day. It's still the largest one-day percentage drop in the index's history, worse even than the 1929 panic day. There are several triggers — an overvalued market, rising rates, panic following that morning's crashes in Asian and European markets — but the scale of the disaster comes down to technology: "portfolio insurance" programs automatically sell shares as prices fall, to cap losses. The more the market drops, the more automatic selling that triggers — a closed loop of code feeding on itself.
A special presidential commission (the Brady Commission) will later investigate the causes — one of the first official documents to directly name program trading as an amplifier of the crash.
That same principle — an algorithm reacting to another algorithm — will return in 2010, at the Flash Crash station.
By the late 1990s, adding ".com" to a company's name is enough to send its stock soaring — even with no profit, sometimes almost no revenue. On March 10, 2000, the NASDAQ Composite peaks at 5,132.52. Then comes the crash: by October 9, 2002, the index falls to 1,114.11 — down 78% in a year and a half, wiping out roughly $5 trillion in market value. Companies like Pets.com and Webvan, seen just yesterday as the future of retail, shut down one after another.
Some of the bubble's "casualties" were actually right about the underlying idea — just 10-15 years too early: home grocery delivery and online pet supplies would become giant businesses (Amazon, Chewy) — but only after the market stopped forgiving companies for losses with no plan to stop them.
The same question — "will there ever be profit?" — is one the market will keep asking every new tech cycle, including the AI companies of the 2020s.
On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy — $639 billion in assets and $613 billion in debts, the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history. It's the culmination of the mortgage crisis: banks had spent years selling and reselling each other bonds backed by low-quality mortgage loans, until it turned out the risk hadn't gone anywhere — it had just hidden inside complex financial instruments. On the day of the announcement, the Dow falls 4.4%. The 14,164.53 peak from October 9, 2007 won't be reached again for years: the bottom, 6,469.95, comes on March 6, 2009 — down 54% from the peak.
Lehman wasn't deliberately saved — regulators let the bank fail so as not to set a precedent of endless bailouts. Days later AIG is bailed out anyway, for over $180 billion — the inconsistency itself became a subject of inquiries for years.
The lesson of 2008 sounds just like the lesson of 1929: financial technology had become unrecognizably complex, but the cause of the crash was the same — debt believed safe that wasn't.
history.com · Wikipedia (Bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers)
May 6, 2010, 2:32 p.m. New York time: the Dow Jones starts falling fast. By 2:47 p.m. — down about 600 points in just 5 minutes, roughly 998.5 points (~9%) on the day in total. Quotes for some large companies flash down to $0.01 or up to $100,000 for a few seconds — the algorithms lose any anchor to reality. By 3:07 p.m., just 36 minutes after it began, the market claws back most of the drop. The later investigation points to a large automated futures sell order that interacted with high-frequency algorithms and set off a cascade.
One of those charged as a result of the investigation was a lone trader in London, trading from his parents' spare bedroom — showing that a market moving trillions can be destabilized without a giant bank being involved.
36 minutes — this time "speed becomes money," the metaphor from the 1867 station, is a literal stopwatch.
On February 19, 2020, the S&P 500 sits at an all-time high. What follows is the fastest crash in history: by March 23 the index has lost 34% in just 33 days, outpacing even 1929 and 2008 for speed. Through March, automatic circuit breakers halt trading for 15 minutes four separate times — March 9, 12, 16, and 18 — something that hadn't happened since the mechanism was introduced after 1987. The Fed's response is unprecedented: rates cut to zero within days, roughly $3 trillion pumped into the economy, direct stimulus checks mailed to households.
The market didn't just recover — it doubled by the end of 2021. Investors who panic-sold in March 2020 near the exact bottom locked in a loss just days before one of the strongest rallies in history began.
The lesson echoes 1929 and 2008: panic is the worst advisor, and crash speed is no longer measured in years.
Hedge funds like Melvin Capital hold a large short position in GameStop, a video-game retail chain many consider a dying business in the age of digital downloads. In January 2021, users of the r/WallStreetBets forum on Reddit notice that funds are short more shares than exist in free float — a coordinated buying push will force them to close positions by buying too, pushing the price higher still. The plan works: on January 27 the stock hits an intraday peak of $483, up from $20 at the start of the month. Melvin Capital, which started the year managing $12.5 billion, loses roughly half and takes an emergency $2.75 billion injection from Citadel and Point72 just to avoid closing immediately — the fund is liquidated anyway in 2022.
The mechanics of this attack — a crowd of retail investors betting against a concentrated short position — mirror what Isaac Le Maire did in 1608, only in reverse: back then a syndicate of insiders played against the company; now a crowd with brokerage apps plays against the fund.
The circle of history closes: the chronicle's first station and this one solve the same problem — who controls the price when everyone's looking the same direction.
On February 24, 2022, Russia launches a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The same day, the Moscow Exchange halts trading across all instruments — and doesn't reopen for nearly a month, until March 24, and even then only partially, for 33 of the largest stocks. The MOEX index falls a record −45% in a single session on the day of the invasion. Brent crude jumps above $100 for the first time since 2014, hitting $139 on March 7 — the highest since 2008. European gas prices hit records on fears of supply disruption. The VIX fear index jumps 20%.
Western countries freeze roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank reserves — an unprecedented move never before applied to an economy this size. The ruble collapses to nearly 118 per dollar before partially recovering thanks to strict capital controls from Russia's central bank.
The market doesn't react to the war itself, but to what it reshapes — flows of oil, gas, and capital — sometimes faster than regulators can respond.
From Amsterdam in 1602 to the phone in your pocket — over 400 years, and every station of the chronicle proved the same thing: the technology changed every time, greed and fear never did. The chronicle has caught up with the present. What's next in the course isn't history — it's tools: how to read a chart, where the market is right and where it's driven by crowd emotion, and what you do with all of it.
The technology changed every time. Greed and fear never did.
The chronicle has caught up with the present. Here's a live chart — the way an SBF analyst sees it today.
This is how the market looked a hundred years ago — the morning paper, columns of numbers: yesterday's high, low, close. No picture — just digits.
A row = a day; compare neighboring rows' closes to see whether the day rose or fell.
There was no other way — the printing press could only do text.
Try to spot a trend reversal in the column. Can't? That's exactly why everything else was invented.
The same closes, but plotted by hand on graph paper by a chartist — each point connected by a line.
The left axis is price, the bottom axis is days; the line's slope is the trend.
The human eye instantly sees shape where numbers go blind. 1930s chartists kept hundreds of these sheets in pencil — one sheet per stock.
The reversal you couldn't find in the table is visible here in a second. But the chart stays silent about what happened INSIDE each day.
The most radical chart in history — it threw out time itself.
X = price rose one box (say, $5), O = it fell one box; while the rise continues, X's stack in the same column upward; a 3-box reversal starts a new column (O's downward). A day, a week, a month — doesn't matter: if the price sits still, the chart doesn't move at all.
Late-19th-century telegraph operators and "tape readers" only marked significant moves — the paper was small, the moves were many.
A long column means a strong trend with no pause; frequent column switches mean the market's thrashing. Your "reversal day" here is the moment the long O column ended and the X's began (the ◆ marker will highlight it).
Japanese rice traders learned to record a day's four prices in a single mark: open, high, low, close. The candle's body runs from open to close (green if it closed higher, red if lower), the wicks reach to the high and low.
One candle equals one whole day, including the fight inside it: a long lower wick means sellers got pushed back; a tiny body inside huge wicks means a war with no winner.
The candle carries everything the table, the line, and Point & Figure carried, plus the day's psychology. The West only learned this method in 1991 (Steve Nison) — and within a decade, candles pushed everything else aside.
The ◆ day — look at how dramatic it was inside, while the line was just showing "a point a bit lower."
The same candles, but alive: levels the market has leaned on for months, calendar events, patterns with a track record — layered over the price.
This isn't a record of the past anymore — it's a workstation. Everything the course teaches shows up here.
The ◆ day on the live chart — with the level it broke and the event that triggered it. The history of drawing charts ends here. Yours begins.