Wall Street priced shares in Spanish pieces of eight until 2000
For over two centuries, a share on the New York Stock Exchange never cost a tidy decimal. Prices moved in eighths of a dollar, a habit inherited from the seventeenth-century Spanish practice of trading in pieces of eight. Only on 28 August 2000 did some stocks switch to decimals, and the rest followed by the end of 2001.
The exchange traces its birth to 17 May 1792, when twenty-four brokers signed the Buttonwood Agreement. Until then, securities were sold by auctioneers who also handled wheat and tobacco; the signers agreed a minimum commission and promised to favour one another in deals. Early trading centred on government paper such as Revolutionary War bonds and stock in the First Bank of the United States. In 1817, after studying how Philadelphia's brokers ran things, the group adopted rules against manipulation, renamed itself the New York Stock and Exchange Board and stopped trading in the Tontine Coffee House in favour of rented rooms of its own.
The telegraph helped New York overtake Philadelphia, and the Civil War fuelled a speculative boom. A rival, the Open Board of Stock Brokers, drew members in the 1860s with continuous trading, which beat the older twice-daily sessions, until the two merged in 1869. The present building at 18 Broad Street, a Beaux Arts design by George B. Post, opened in 1903.
Crashes punctuate the timeline. The sell-off of October 1929 is widely blamed for triggering the Great Depression, and in 1934 the exchange registered with the new Securities and Exchange Commission. On 19 October 1987 the Dow Jones average fell 22.6 percent in a single day. In 1967 the activist Abbie Hoffman led a group into the visitors' gallery to throw fistfuls of dollars at traders, some of whom booed while others laughed and waved; three months later the gallery was sealed behind bulletproof glass.
The institution has changed shape repeatedly. It merged with the electronic rival Archipelago and became a for-profit public company in 2006, joined Euronext in 2007 to form the first transatlantic exchange, and now belongs to Intercontinental Exchange. In 2018 Stacey Cunningham became its 67th president and the first woman to lead it in 226 years. By market capitalisation, the Big Board is the biggest stock exchange anywhere.
Source: New York Stock Exchange
