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The World’s First Stock Exchange Page 5 (14 of 305)
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A World-Famous Book
overconfident that he offered ten points over the price. His bid
was snapped up, and straightaway “so great was the noise, the
shouting, and the laughter . . . that I blushed, not because of my
foolishness, but from fury and shame.”8
The philosopher is swiftly disillusioned: “I know full well that
there must be many stockbrokers who, were they not such, would
be a model of amiability and a treasure-house of excellence, but
let them but come near shares and some Medea or other seems to
transform them or a Circe to bewitch them.” When the price takes
yet another tumble, the philosopher comes close to despair: “I
don’t know what I did, nor what I’m doing, nor what I must do.”
Like the merchant, who had also ventured to make a few transac-
tions, he decides to pull out of the trade without delay: “I realize
that my intellect is not equal to this tangle, for if the study of it is
enough to confound me, just think what would happen were I to
embark upon it in earnest.”9
The philosopher doubts that he has a sufficient grasp of the
stock market because his intellect is inadequate. And it really did
not help that the shareholder who revealed to them how the stock
exchange worked did so in a very obscure and roundabout way.
In his explanation of options he simply said that “one uses them
as sails for a happy voyage during a beneficent conjuncture and
as an anchor of security in a storm.”10 Would this have enabled
the merchant and the philosopher to understand how an option
works and what they could use options for?
Things become even more complex and incomprehensible when
the shareholder explains that traders can refuse to accept a share
by saying that they made “an appeal to Frederick.”11 What sort of
cryptic invocation was this—a spell that could seemingly release a
trader from all his obligations?
To be frank, Confusión de confusiones raises more questions
than it answers. It certainly makes it clear that seventeenth-cen-
tury Amsterdam was gripped by stock market fever and that
the traders used all sorts of complicated transactions. But how,
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