Europe had older forms of organised dealing in financial paper: fourteenth-century Genoese merchants traded government debt, fifteenth-century Bruges had a money market, sixteenth-century Antwerp had a busy bourse for bills of exchange and bonds. But these markets dealt in individual obligations; there was no continuous, publicly priced market for shares in a single going concern in which many buyers and sellers met every day. When the VOC was founded in 1602, the truly novel feature of its shares was that the holder could transfer them rather than redeem them. That transfer process quickly became, on the Amsterdam exchange — from 1611 in the building designed by Hendrick de Keyser — a daily market.

The institution generated almost the entire toolkit of modern finance with startling speed. In 1609 a group led by the merchant Isaac Le Maire concluded that VOC shares were over-priced and arranged to sell shares they did not yet own, planning to buy back later at lower prices — the first recorded large short-selling operation. The VOC complained, the States General partially outlawed naked shorting, but the practice merely went underground. By the mid-seventeenth century forward contracts and options were routine. In 1688 the Sephardic merchant Joseph de la Vega published 'Confusión de Confusiones', a dialogue describing every one of these operations — investor psychology, manipulation, bubble dynamics — in language a modern trader would recognise. It is the first book ever written about a stock market.

London arrived later and more chaotically. After 1694 the Bank of England and the growing market in government debt needed a venue; the merchants who shouted over their deals were finally expelled from the Royal Exchange. In 1698 the broker John Castaing began publishing a printed list of 'the course of the exchange and other things' from Jonathan's Coffee House — the seed of the London Stock Exchange. A group of brokers from the same coffee house went on, in 1773, to found the formal Exchange building.

Amsterdam's real contribution was less any single instrument than the way it brought them together: a continuous, transparent, deep public market; a settlement institution (the Wisselbank of 1609); and an investor base willing to test new financial forms. Capital became, in this institution, a transferable, scalable, continuously re-priced resource. The financing of railways in the Industrial Revolution and the public offerings of the twentieth century are direct descendants of this seventeenth-century experiment.