The Rise of Wall Street: History of the Stock Market

Stock Market is an avenue from which stocks of companies are bought and sold.

For some, they thought that stock market and Wall Street are the same. Wall Street in New York is just one example of a stock market.

Wall Street though is very significant in a sense that this is were the concept of stock market started.

The Wall Street establishment was built in 1653. Its purpose then is for defense and not for commerce. Dutch settlers fortressed themselves from Native Americans and British by building a 12 foot stockade fence,

In 1685, the wall was torn down and replaced by a new street. The British named it Wall Street.

The Stock Exchange

Wall Street is made famous with the emergence of two powerful stock exchanges. This resulted in the chaotic trading which turned out to be the financial markets that we know today.

The first stock exchange in the United States was founded in 1790 in Philadelphia. Two years later, a group of New York traders met and thought about setting up a security business. These 24-man groups are the founders of the New York Stock Exchange.

In 1817, the New York merchants were upset by the bad state of their stock exchange.
They sent one of their members to Philadelphia to take a look at their trading. The representative found out that Philadelphia is doing well in their exchange. The merchant returned to New York and discussed to the group how things were being done in Philadelphia. Shortly after, the “New York Stock and Exchange Board” was formally organized.

The exchange center was inaugurated on Wall Street. The rest was history. From a troubled beginning, the New York Stock exchange emerged as the place where billions of dollars worth of stocks and bonds are traded each day.

But the success of Wall Street did not happen overnight.   In the early 1990’s, the New York Stock Exchange was already on the rise. But this financial boom could not be sustained. In 1929, the stock market crashed, shocked the world and caused the Great Depression.

Although the economy eventually recovered, the mistakes of the Great Depression haunted them back. In 1987, the stock market again crashed. The crash was so crippling that the Dow Jones suffered the largest single-day loss in the stock market’s history.

Since then, the government and the industry have been trying to set up measures to prevent such a large-scale crash. Now, the stock market is an essential component in the world’s economy. Proper safeguards and systems to reduce or prevent another stock market crash are of utmost importance.