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In his famous book Confusión de confusions Joseph Penso de la Vega wrote: "If one were to lead a stranger through the streets of Amsterdam and ask him where he was, he would answer 'among speculators,' for there is no corner where one does not talk shares." And, Lodewijk Petram adds, "the people of Amsterdam were talking about options, too, and forward selling, quotations and prices, risk and speculation-all relating to the trade in the shares of the Dutch East India Company (the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie, VOC), which had been established in 1602. Fortunes were made and lost, and the men who engaged in this trade were wholly in thrall to it." Petram did extensive archival research, including mining the records of active traders, to shed new light on de la Vega's account of the Amsterdam stock market. The Dutch edition of his book appeared in 2011. Columbia Business School Publishing/Columbia University Press has just released the English edition, The World's First Stock Exchange, skillfully translated by Lynne Richards. It's an engrossing tale.

Resurrecting a 45-year-old book, Bill Gates included Business Adventures: Twelve Classic Tales from the World of Wall Street on his 2014 summer reading list. His enthusiasm ("Warren Buffett recommended this book to me back in 1991, and it's still the best business book I've ever read"-and claims it's Warren Buffett's favorite business book, too) was contagious. With prodding by Gates's team, the out-of-print book was reissued as an e-book by Open Road, and as I write this post it's Amazon's #1 best seller in commerce and #2 in books. John Brooks originally published these business stories in The New Yorker, so it goes without saying that they are well written. Describing the stock market as "the daytime adventure serial of the well-to-do," Brooks devotes the first chapter to a blow-by-blow account of the "little crash" and rapid recovery that occurred in the last week of May 1962. On Monday the Dow dropped more than it had on any day except October 28, 1929. By Thursday, after the Wednesday Memorial Day holiday, it closed "slightly above the level where it had been before all the excitement began." The infrastructure in place at the time could not cope with the overwhelming trading volume. On Tuesday, May 29, "there was something very close to a complete breakdown of the reticulated, automated, mind-boggling complex of technical facilities that made nationwide stocktrading possible in a huge country where nearly one out of six adults was a stockholder. Many orders were executed at prices far different from the ones agreed to by the customers placing the orders; many others were lost in transmission, or in the snow of scrap paper that covered the Exchange floor, and were never executed at all.