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The World’s First Stock Exchange Page 3 (12 of 305)
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A World-Famous Book
The book’s recent popularity was not caused solely by this in-
terest in history. In 1995 the Financial Times published an article
in which the editor picked Confusión de confusiones as one of the
ten best books on investment ever written, describing it as a guide
for modern investors.5 Every investor should know how the stock
market worked in its original and purest form before venturing
into current financial markets. And where better to find this than
in a book about the world’s oldest stock exchange, created in
seventeenth-century Amsterdam?
Several new editions have appeared in recent years, but few of
them contain the whole of de la Vega’s text. Confusión de confu-
siones is a bulky book, two-thirds of it devoted to long, rambling
digressions into parallels between the Amsterdam stock market
and biblical and mythological stories. These tedious sections are
usually omitted. So what do the buyers of the slimmed-down edi-
tions actually get?
There are three characters in Confusión de confusiones. Two of
them, a merchant and a philosopher, have heard about the trade
in shares and sometimes even watch the traders, but they do not
really understand how it works and are afraid to take part in it
themselves. They call upon the assistance of an experienced share-
holder, the third character. In four imagined dialogues—a popu-
lar device for structuring a book in the seventeenth century—the
shareholder explains to the others how trading is conducted, tells
them about the different types of transactions, and warns them
of the tricks and deceptions they must watch out for if they enter
the fray.
The picture of share dealing that emerges is not always an at-
tractive one. Negotiations over a share transaction could some-
times get quite heated and physical:
A member of the Exchange opens his hand and another takes
it, and thus sells a number of shares at a fixed price, which is
confirmed by a second handshake. With a new handshake a
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