Infrastructure

The worlds first official stock exchange, established by the Dutch East India Company in 1602. The V...

Founded in 1698 when John Castaing began posting stock and commodity prices at Jonathans Coffee Hous...

The founding document of the New York Stock Exchange. On May 17, 1792, 24 stockbrokers signed an agr...

Created by Charles Dow, co-founder of Dow Jones and Company, on May 26, 1896. The original index inc...

The Standard and Poors 500 Index was introduced in 1957, tracking 500 large US companies. It became ...

The worlds first electronic stock exchange, founded on February 8, 1971. NASDAQ originally stood for...

John Bogle founded Vanguard in 1975, creating the first index mutual fund available to individual in...

Alfred Winslow Jones created the first hedge fund in 1949. Jones used a strategy of buying undervalu...

The first Exchange Traded Fund, SPDR S&P 500 ETF (SPY), launched on January 22, 1993. Created by Sta...

Robinhood launched in 2013, offering commission free stock trading through a mobile app. Founded by ...

Warren Buffett took control of Berkshire Hathaway, a struggling textile manufacturer, in 1965. He tr...

The VOC was the first multinational corporation and the first to issue public stock. It paid an aver...

The British East India Company was originally a trading company that evolved into a de facto colonia...

The First Bank of the United States was chartered in 1791 for 20 years. Proposed by Alexander Hamilt...

The Second Bank of the United States was chartered in 1816 to stabilize the economy after the War of...

The Big Bang of October 27, 1986 deregulated the London Stock Exchange. It eliminated fixed commissi...

The Banking Act of 1933, known as Glass-Steagall, separated commercial banking from investment banki...

The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act of 1999 repealed the Glass-Steagall separation of commercial and investme...

The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act of 2010 was the most comprehensive fin...

The Fugger family of Augsburg was the wealthiest banking dynasty of the Renaissance. Jacob Fugger th...

The Medici Bank, founded in 1397, was the most respected bank in Renaissance Europe. Under Cosimo de...

The Knights Templar developed an early international banking system during the Crusades. Pilgrims co...

The Securities and Exchange Commission was created by the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 in respons...

The Commodity Exchange Act of 1936 regulated futures and options trading in the United States. It wa...

The Markets in Financial Instruments Directive took effect in 2007, creating a single market for fin...

Japans postal savings system, established in 1875, became the largest pool of savings in the world. ...

The Government of Singapore Investment Corporation was founded in 1981 by Lee Kuan Yew to manage Sin...

The Government Pension Fund Global, commonly called the Norwegian Oil Fund, was established in 1990 ...

The Tokyo Stock Exchange was established on May 15, 1878. It became the largest exchange in the worl...

The Shanghai Stock Exchange was re established on November 26, 1990, after a 41 year hiatus followin...

The Hong Kong Stock Exchange traces its origins to the Association of Stockbrokers in Hong Kong, fou...

The first index fund available to individual investors was launched by Vanguard on August 31, 1976. ...

The quantitative investing revolution transformed finance starting in the 2000s. Mathematical models...

In October 2019, major US brokerages including Charles Schwab, TD Ameritrade, E Trade, and Fidelity ...

The Antwerp Bourse, established in 1531, was the first purpose built building for trading securities...

A tontine is a financial instrument where participants contribute to a pool, and as members die, the...

Marine insurance emerged in the coffee houses of London in the late 17th century. Edward Lloyds coff...

The Efficient Market Hypothesis, developed by Eugene Fama in 1970, argues that stock prices fully re...

Harry Markowitz published Portfolio Selection in 1952, introducing the idea that investors should co...

The Black-Scholes options pricing model, published in 1973 by Fischer Black, Myron Scholes, and Robe...

The New York Stock Exchange, long a bastion of floor traders and specialists, embraced electronic tr...

Direct listings allow companies to go public without using investment banks as underwriters. Existin...

The Pecora Commission, led by Ferdinand Pecora, investigated Wall Street practices after the 1929 cr...

Benjamin Graham published Security Analysis in 1934, laying the foundation for value investing. Grah...

Jim Simons, a mathematician and former NSA codebreaker, founded Renaissance Technologies in 1982. Th...

Ray Dalio founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 in his New York apartment. Bridgewater became the l...

Warren Buffett took control of Berkshire Hathaway in 1965 and transformed it into the greatest inves...

Charlie Munger was Warren Buffetts partner at Berkshire Hathaway for 45 years. Munger shifted Buffet...

Peter Lynch managed the Fidelity Magellan Fund from 1977 to 1990, averaging 29.2 percent annually, t...

Tombstone advertisements are the simple, formal notices that investment banks place in newspapers to...

The Bloomberg Terminal was launched in 1982 by Michael Bloomberg after he was laid off from Salomon ...

The invention of the telegraph in 1844 revolutionized stock trading. Before the telegraph, price inf...

The Federal Reserve Act of 1913 created the central bank of the United States after a century withou...

Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, warned in 1998 that unregulated o...

Michael Lewis published Flash Boys in 2014, exposing how high frequency traders used fiber optic cab...

The 2013 film The Wolf of Wall Street depicted the excesses of Jordan Belfort, a penny stock broker ...

The 1987 film Wall Street, directed by Oliver Stone, defined the image of 1980s finance. Michael Dou...

Crowdfunding emerged in the late 2000s as a new way to raise capital. Kickstarter, founded in 2009, ...