Type | |
---|---|
Location | Amsterdam, Netherlands |
Founded | 1602 |
Owner | Euronext |
Key people | Maurice van Tilburg (CEO) |
Currency | EUR |
No. of listings | 174 |
Indices |
AEX index AMX index AScX index |
Website | www |
The Amsterdam Stock Exchange is the former name for the based in Amsterdam. It merged on 22 September 2000 with the and the to form Euronext, and is now known as Euronext Amsterdam.
The Amsterdam Stock Exchange was established in 1602 by the Dutch East India Company (Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie, or "VOC") for dealings in its printed and bonds. It was subsequently renamed the Amsterdam Bourse and was the first to formally begin trading in securities.
Although it is usually considered to be the first stock market, Fernand Braudel argues that this is not precisely true:
"It is not quite accurate to call [Amsterdam] the first stock market, as people often do. State loan stocks had been negotiable at a very early date in Venice, in Florence before 1328, and in Genoa, where there was an active market in the luoghi and paghe of Casa di San Giorgio, not to mention the Kuxen shares in the German mines which were quoted as early as the fifteenth century at the Leipzig fairs, the Spanish juros, the French rentes sur l’Hotel de Ville (municipal stocks) (1522) or the stock market in the Hanseatic towns from the fifteenth century. The statutes of Verona in 1318 confirm the existence of the settlement or forward market ... In 1428, the jurist Bartolomeo de Bosco protested against the sale of forward loca in Genoa. All evidence points to the Mediterranean as the cradle of the stock market. But what was new in Amsterdam was the volume, the fluidity of the market and publicity it received, and the speculative freedom of transactions."
That said, it remains the first incarnation of what we could today recognize as a stock market.
The European Option Exchange (EOE) was founded in 1978 in Amsterdam as a futures and options exchange. In 1983 it started a , called the EOE index, consisting of the 25 largest companies that trade on the stock exchange. It should be noted that forward contracts, options, and other sophisticated instruments were traded on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange well before this.
In 1997 the Amsterdam Stock Exchange and the EOE merged, and its blue chip index was renamed AEX, for "Amsterdam EXchange". It is now managed by Euronext Amsterdam. On 3 October 2011, Princess Máxima opened the new trading floor of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange.