The History of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange: From the 1602 VOC IPO to the AEX at 1,000

The Amsterdam Stock Exchange is the oldest stock exchange in the world. It grew up in 1602 around the shares of the Dutch East India Company (the VOC), the first company to sell its shares to the public and let them be traded, and its direct descendant, Euronext Amsterdam, still runs the AEX index today. In its first generation the city gave the world the first IPO, the first short seller, the first ban on short selling, the first stock market regulation, the first options and forward contracts on shares, and, in the winter of 1636–37, a speculative mania over tulip bulbs that is still the most famous bubble ever told.

This is the full history of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, from a merchant’s parlour on the Nes in August 1602 to the AEX closing above 1,000 for the first time in January 2026. It separates the record from the legend where the two part company, which happens more often than most histories admit, and it reads every episode as a trader would. Nothing essential has been invented in markets since the Dutch finished inventing them. The technology changed. The crowd did not.

Amsterdam Stock Exchange History at a Glance

Four centuries in one table. Every line is expanded in the sections that follow.

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Before 1602: The Pre-Companies

The Dutch did not set out to invent the stock market. They set out to reach the spice islands of the East Indies, and to do it without the Portuguese, who had controlled the trade for most of the sixteenth century and with whom the young Dutch Republic was at war.

From 1594, groups of merchants in Amsterdam, Middelburg, Rotterdam, Enkhuizen and Hoorn formed temporary partnerships, the voorcompagnieën or pre-companies, to finance one voyage at a time. Between 1594 and 1601 they sent out fifteen expeditions involving 65 ships. When the fleet came home, the cargo was sold, the partners were paid and the partnership was wound up. Investors were locked in until the ships returned, which could take years, and could not get their money out any earlier.

The voyages paid, which was the problem. Twelve rival pre-companies competed for the same pepper in the same ports, bidding up prices in Asia and flooding the market at home. A contemporary complained that they were sailing each other’s money out of their purses. In 1602 the States General, the Republic’s highest governing body, forced them into a single company.

August 1602: The First IPO

On 20 March 1602, the States General granted a charter to the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie, the United East India Company, known ever since as the VOC. It had 46 articles and a 21-year monopoly on Dutch trade east of the Cape of Good Hope. It also had powers no merchant partnership had held before: to make treaties, build forts, raise troops and wage war in Asia.

The most important article was the tenth. All the residents of the United Provinces, it said, could buy shares in the company. There was no minimum and no maximum. The next article said posters would be put up announcing the subscription. The company kept six semi-independent chambers, one in each of the founding ports, and each ran its own share issue. The capital was committed for the full 21 years, with one concession to nervous investors: a general accounting after ten years, in 1612, when shareholders would be allowed to ask for their money back.

In Amsterdam, the subscription was run from the house of Dirck van Os, one of the new directors, on a street called the Nes. For the whole of August 1602, people came to his parlour to have their names and amounts written into a ledger. The directors each put in 12,000 guilders, enough, the historian Lodewijk Petram notes, to buy six modest canal houses. Among the last to sign was Neeltgen Cornelis, van Os’s maid, who subscribed 100 guilders at a time when her wages were under fifty cents a day.

When the book closed at midnight on 31 August 1602, a notary tallied it in front of two witnesses: 3,674,945 guilders, from 1,143 investors. Across all six chambers the company raised about 6.4 million guilders, of which Amsterdam provided 57%, even though plague had driven many people out of the city that summer. Middelburg supplied 20%, with Enkhuizen, Hoorn, Delft and Rotterdam making up the rest.

What made those shares historic was not the public issue. It was a sentence added to the first page of the Amsterdam ledger: shares could be conveyed or transferred through the chamber’s bookkeeper, in the presence of two directors, with the transfer recorded in a special register. With their money locked in for 21 years, investors now had a way out. They could sell their stake to someone else. A permanent, liquid market in company ownership had been created almost as an afterthought.

The Bridge, the Dam and the Beurs

The first share trades in history did not happen in a building. According to Petram, they happened in the open air on the New Bridge (Nieuwe Brug) over the Damrak, where merchants gathered to hear shipping news, and then on Dam Square, where business carried on after hours. Buyers and sellers agreed a price, walked to the company’s office and had the bookkeeper record the transfer.

Two institutions turned that street market into a financial centre. In 1609 the city founded the Exchange Bank, the Wisselbank, where merchants held accounts in reliable bank money and could settle trades and bills of exchange by transfer rather than in the Republic’s chaotic mix of coins. And in 1611 the city opened a covered exchange building on the Rokin, designed by Hendrick de Keyser: an arcaded courtyard open to the sky, where commodity merchants and share dealers met at fixed hours. It was the first purpose-built bourse in which shares were traded as a matter of routine.

The oldest surviving evidence of a VOC shareholding is not from Amsterdam at all. In 2010 a history student at Utrecht University, Ruben Schalk, was working through the Enkhuizen archives in Hoorn for his thesis and found a receipt dated 9 September 1606, made out to Pieter Harmensz, a messenger for the town’s mayors, for the last instalment of his 150-guilder investment. Guinness now lists it as the oldest share certificate in the world. Harmensz held his share until he died in 1638, and left it to his widow and daughter.

1609–1610: The First Short Seller and the First Ban

It took about six years for someone to discover that a share price could also be pushed down.

Isaac Le Maire was one of the richest merchants in Amsterdam, a refugee from the Southern Netherlands, one of the 1,143 original subscribers and one of the Amsterdam chamber’s first directors. He fell out with his fellow directors over the accounts of an early expedition and resigned in 1605. By 1607 VOC shares were trading at around 212% of their issue price. Le Maire believed they were overvalued, and he had a motive beyond profit: if the price fell below par before the 1612 accounting, investors might ask for their money back, the company might be wound up, and he could found a rival.

In 1608 he organised a syndicate that sold VOC shares for future delivery, often a year or more ahead, without owning them. It was naked short selling through forward contracts, and it came with a whispering campaign about ships lost and voyages failing. The price fell. By January 1610 it was quoted at about 126%.

Le Maire was also the first activist shareholder. On 24 January 1609 he filed a petition complaining about the company’s governance: shareholders had no say, the directors were answerable to no one, and the company had never paid a dividend. The complaints were fair. They are still, four centuries later, the complaints activists make.

The directors replied with a petition of their own. The short sellers, they argued, were damaging investors, particularly the many widows and orphans who depended on VOC shares for their income. As Petram points out, the number of widows and orphans relying on the company was very small. It worked anyway. On 27 February 1610 an edict banned the sale of shares the seller did not own and required delivery within a month. It was the first stock market regulation in the history of the world.

The company did something more effective too. It paid its first dividend in 1610, and paid it largely in kind: 75% of the share’s face value in mace, followed by pepper and then cash. The share price recovered. Le Maire lost heavily, although he spent the rest of his life trying to break the VOC’s monopoly. His son Jacob found a new route into the Pacific around Cape Horn in 1616, and the strait he sailed through still carries the family name.

The ban itself was barely enforced, and short selling carried on under other names. Almost every short-selling ban since, including the bans of 2008 and 2020, has followed the same script: a falling price, a campaign against the sellers, an appeal to the vulnerable, a ban, and a market that finds a way around it. Bans can slow a fall. They rarely change what the fall is telling you.

Forwards, Options and Angry Shareholders

Within a generation, Amsterdam’s traders had built nearly the whole of the modern toolkit around a single stock. Forward contracts, like Le Maire’s, let traders buy or sell shares for delivery on a future date. Options gave the right, but not the obligation, to buy or sell at a set price. Traders financed positions with borrowed money, using shares as collateral. Coordinated groups ran campaigns to push the price one way or the other. By 1683 demand was strong enough that traders dealt in fractions of a share through smaller units called ducaton shares, which let people of more modest means speculate.

The governance fight did not end with Le Maire. When the charter came up for renewal in 1622 and 1623, shareholders flooded the city with pamphlets accusing the directors of running the company for their own benefit. The directors were concerned first with their own incomes, the States General treated the VOC as an arm of the war against Spain, and the shareholders, who wanted profits, had almost no say. The renewal brought modest concessions and little real power. The pattern set then, owners who carry the risk and managers who control the decisions, has never quite been solved.

The share price, meanwhile, went nowhere for three decades. It did not rise above 200% of par until 1633. Then the long-awaited profits from Asia arrived and it climbed steeply, into a boom that coincided almost exactly with the most famous mania in history.

1636–1637: Tulip Mania, Record and Legend

Tulips reached the Low Countries from the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the sixteenth century, and the botanist Carolus Clusius grew them at Leiden from the 1590s. By the 1630s they were a luxury good in the richest society in Europe. The most prized were the “broken” varieties, whose petals carried flames and feathers of colour. Nobody knew it then, but the patterns were caused by a virus, which also weakened the bulbs and made them slow to multiply. The rarest flowers were rare because they were sick.

Bulbs can only be lifted and moved in summer, so for most of the year trade was in promises: contracts to deliver a bulb that was still in the ground. In the winter of 1636 to 1637, that trade moved into taverns, where groups of dealers called colleges met to buy and sell under their own informal rules, often with a small token payment rather than a deposit. The Dutch later called it the windhandel, the wind trade, because nothing physical changed hands.

Prices went vertical. The economist Peter Garber, the most cited sceptic of the mania story, found that the rare bulbs behaved much as rare luxury goods usually do. But even Garber could not explain what happened to the common ones. The price of Witte Croonen, an ordinary variety sold by weight, rose roughly twenty-six-fold during January 1637 and then, within a week of the peak, fell to about a twentieth of it. Garber wrote that he would be hard pressed to find a fundamental explanation. Contemporary pamphlets priced the finest single bulbs, such as the Semper Augustus, at thousands of guilders, more than a good Amsterdam house.

In the first week of February 1637, at a sale in Haarlem, buyers failed to appear. The collapse spread through the colleges of Holland within days. Sellers wanted their contracts honoured, buyers refused to pay, and the growers’ delegates meeting in Amsterdam proposed letting buyers cancel for a fraction of the agreed price. The Court of Holland declined to rule and sent disputes back to the towns. Most were eventually settled at between 3.5% and 10% of the contract price.

The shape is the part that matters. Every later mania, from the South Sea Bubble to dot-com stocks to meme coins, repeats it: a real story, a way to buy with very little money down, a crowd that joins because its neighbours are getting rich, and a moment when buyers simply vanish. There were no bids in Haarlem that February. There were no bids for common bulbs at any price. The full story, with the prices and the pamphlets, is told in Market Mayhem Episode 1: Tulip Mania and in the book Market Mayhem.

1688: The First Book About the Stock Market

Half a century later, a Sephardic Jewish merchant in Amsterdam named Joseph Penso de la Vega, whose family had fled the Inquisition in Spain, wrote Confusión de Confusiones. Published in Amsterdam in 1688 and written in Spanish as a series of dialogues between a philosopher, a merchant and a shareholder, it is the oldest known book about a stock exchange.

It describes a market any modern trader would recognise: bulls and bears, options used to hedge and to speculate, rumour campaigns, traders who could not stop watching the price, and speculators whose moods swung from euphoria to despair. De la Vega called the exchange a labyrinth. In the second dialogue his shareholder sets out four principles of speculation. In Hermann Kellenbenz’s 1957 English translation, the first and third read:

“Never give anyone the advice to buy or sell shares, because, where perspicacity is weakened, the most benevolent piece of advice can turn out badly.”

“Profits on the exchange are the treasures of goblins. At one time they may be carbuncle stones, then coals, then diamonds, then flint-stones, then morning dew, then tears.”

– Joseph de la Vega, Confusión de Confusiones, 1688 (trans. Kellenbenz, 1957)

The second principle tells the trader to take every gain without regretting the profit he missed, and the fourth warns that whoever wishes to win in this game must have patience and money, because prices are so little constant and rumours so little founded on truth. Read them again as a modern risk manager would. Do not outsource your decisions. Take profits without regret. Treat open profits as provisional. Carry enough capital, and enough patience, to survive being wrong for longer than you expected. The Federation of European Securities Exchanges now awards an annual research prize in his name.

The VOC at Its Height, and Its Cost

By the middle of the seventeenth century, the VOC was the largest commercial organisation in the world. It employed around 50,000 people across the Netherlands and Asia. Between 1602 and 1799 its ships made nearly 5,000 voyages to Asia and carried about a million people there. Over its lifetime it paid dividends averaging around 18% of its capital a year. For a shareholder in the 1650s, it looked like the greatest investment ever made.

That return had a price, and other people paid it. The company’s monopoly was built by force. In 1621 its governor-general, Jan Pieterszoon Coen, conquered the Banda Islands, the only source of nutmeg in the world, and most of the islands’ population, estimated at about 15,000 people, were killed, enslaved, starved or driven out. The company traded enslaved people across the Indian Ocean. At the Cape of Good Hope, where Jan van Riebeeck founded a refreshment station for VOC ships in 1652, the company’s arrival began the dispossession of the Khoikhoi and brought slavery to what became Cape Town. For South African readers, the VOC is not only financial history.

For a trader, the lesson is a hard one. A share price records what an asset earns. It does not record how. Markets will pay a premium for a monopoly, whether it is built on a patent, a network or a garrison, and the premium disappears when the monopoly does.

1672: The Disaster Year

In 1672, France, England and two German bishoprics attacked the Republic at once. French armies overran much of the country and came within reach of Amsterdam, which was saved only by opening the dykes and flooding the land in front of it. The Dutch still call it the Rampjaar, the Disaster Year: the people were desperate, the government irrational and the country beyond saving, in the words of the saying of the time.

The markets panicked with everyone else. The VOC’s share price, which had swung with every war against England since the 1650s, dropped sharply, and trade with Europe was interrupted. The Republic survived, and so did the exchange. The Dutch stock market history foundation tells a revealing story from that war: the Republic persuaded the Holy Roman Emperor, Leopold I, to fight on its side in return for Dutch government bonds, and the Emperor discovered that the price of his bonds rose and fell with his own success on the battlefield. War news had become a tradable asset.

1720: The Wind Trade Comes Back

In 1720, when John Law’s Mississippi scheme was blowing up Paris and the South Sea Bubble was blowing up London, Dutch investors caught the fever too. Towns across the Republic granted charters to new companies, many of them little more than a prospectus and a promise, and the Dutch revived the old word for them: the wind trade. VOC shares, which had drifted for decades, rose above 1,000% of par. When the bubbles burst abroad, the Dutch ones burst too.

That same year Amsterdam’s printers produced Het Groote Tafereel der Dwaasheid, The Great Mirror of Folly, a thick volume of satirical prints, plays and poems mocking the speculators of 1720. It is the first great publishing event built on a market crash, and its engravings of fools, jesters and wind-merchants are still the images reached for whenever a bubble needs illustrating.

The difference was the damage. Amsterdam’s authorities intervened early, and the Dutch crash, according to the foundation that records the history of the Dutch exchange, did far less lasting harm than the disasters in England and France. The most sophisticated market in Europe had seen a mania before. For once, experience worked.

1763: Leverage, Bills and the First Modern Credit Crisis

By the eighteenth century Amsterdam had become the banker to Europe. Austria borrowed there first, in 1695, and Spain, Russia, Sweden, France and England followed. Dutch merchants turned into merchant bankers, financing trade across the continent with chains of bills of exchange, each bank guaranteeing the next.

The Seven Years’ War made some of them very rich. The fastest-growing was the house of the de Neufville brothers, founded in 1751 by Leendert Pieter de Neufville when he was 21 years old. It speculated in depreciating wartime currencies, endorsed huge numbers of bills and, at the end of the war, bet heavily on grain bought from the retreating Russian army. When peace came in February 1763, grain prices collapsed by more than three quarters, the collateral behind the bills lost its value, and lenders stopped rolling the debts over.

On 29 and 30 July 1763, first Aron Joseph & Co and then de Neufville stopped paying. De Neufville had liabilities of 9.6 million florins against capital of about 413,000, leverage of roughly twenty-four times, and was nearly half the size of the Bank of Amsterdam itself. The failure ran straight to Hamburg, where claims against the firm were spread across dozens of counterparties, and then back again. By September, 38 Amsterdam firms had failed, with more than a hundred failures across northern Europe, most of them in Hamburg.

It could have been much worse. The Bank of Amsterdam, unusually, lent against silver bullion as well as coin from early August, providing liquidity to firms that were short of cash but not insolvent. Economists at the Federal Reserve and the Bank for International Settlements have since studied 1763 as an early version of 2008: leverage hidden in chains of short-term debt that everyone believed was hedged, a sudden fall in the value of collateral, and a crisis that travelled along the web of counterparties rather than through any single market.

1773–1799: The First Fund and the Fall of the VOC

Ten years later a second crisis arrived from Britain, where the collapse of the Ayr Bank dragged down the Amsterdam house of Clifford & Co in 1772 and set off a new wave of Dutch bankruptcies. Out of it came another first. In 1774 the Amsterdam broker Abraham van Ketwich launched Eendragt Maakt Magt, “Unity Makes Strength”, which pooled investors’ money across a spread of bonds and plantation loans. It was the world’s first investment fund, created because two crises in a decade had taught people the value of diversification. It did poorly, overwhelmed by the upheavals that followed, and the idea did not properly return in the Netherlands until the founding of Robeco after 1929.

The VOC was already in trouble. Its profits had fallen from around 18% of revenue in its golden decades to 2% or 3% by the late eighteenth century, but it kept paying dividends greater than its profits, borrowing short to cover the gap. Smuggling and corruption ran through its Asian posts. The Fourth Anglo-Dutch War of 1780 to 1784 cut its shipping to pieces. And it had been quietly borrowing from the Bank of Amsterdam, whose reputation for sound money had been the bedrock of the whole Dutch system.

When French revolutionary armies entered the Netherlands in 1795, the new Batavian Republic inherited the wreckage. The VOC was nationalised on 1 March 1796, and on 31 December 1799 its charter was allowed to expire. After almost two hundred years, the company that had created the stock market was gone, and its debts passed to the state. The exchange it created carried on without it.

The lesson is the one Le Maire complained about in 1609. The VOC’s shareholders never controlled the company, never saw honest accounts and were paid dividends the business could not afford. A dividend paid out of borrowed money is not a return. It is a delay.

The Long Decline: 1795–1850

The French period, from 1795 to 1813, broke Amsterdam’s lead. Trade with Britain was cut off, the Republic became first a French satellite and then part of France itself, the national debt ballooned, and London, which had borrowed the Dutch model a century earlier, took over as the world’s financier. The number of listings in Amsterdam fell. A rival dealers’ association split away from the existing one.

The low point was physical. Hendrick de Keyser’s exchange, built on soft ground over the Rokin, had been sinking for years, and in 1835 it had to close. For a while the city debated whether it needed a stock exchange at all, and the merchants spent a decade in a temporary building. Around 1840 the Kingdom of the Netherlands came close to defaulting on its debts, and was saved by refinancing them through the Amsterdam market at a lower rate of interest. The exchange that had nearly been abandoned turned out to be the thing that kept the country solvent.

The Second Golden Age: Zocher, Berlage and Beursplein 5

In 1845 the merchants finally got a new building, the classical exchange designed by Jan David Zocher on the Dam. Goods and securities were still traded side by side, but securities were growing fastest, and in 1876 the dealers formed their own association, the Vereeniging voor den Effectenhandel, to press for better rules and better premises.

The late nineteenth century was Amsterdam’s second golden age as a market. Dutch investors poured money into foreign railways, above all in the United States, and from around 1890 into Dutch industry and the plantations and mines of the Dutch East Indies. Between 1865 and 1900 the number of securities listed in Amsterdam rose more than eightfold, to about a thousand.

In 1903 Hendrik Petrus Berlage’s new exchange opened on the Damrak, a brick building now regarded as a founding work of modern Dutch architecture, and the stockbrokers had a floor of their own for the first time. They outgrew it within a decade. At the end of 1913 the securities market moved to its own building at Beursplein 5, where Euronext Amsterdam is still based. In 1914, for the first time, Dutch company shares outnumbered government bonds on the list, and domestic securities outnumbered foreign ones. Amsterdam had stopped being mainly the financier of other countries and become the stock exchange of the Netherlands.

Crash, War and the First Options Exchange

The second golden age ended in stages: the crash of 1929 and the depression of the 1930s, the German occupation from 1940 to 1945, and the loss of the Dutch East Indies after the war, summed up in a bitter Dutch saying of the time, Indië verloren, rampspoed geboren, “the Indies lost, disaster born.” After the war, interest in shares reached a low point. In 1955 the exchange launched a public campaign to win investors back, and slowly it worked.

Amsterdam’s next first came in 1978, when the European Options Exchange opened on a floor inside the Beurs van Berlage, the first options exchange in Europe. The early years were slow, but in the 1980s trading boomed. The options floor moved to larger premises on the Rokin in 1987 and outgrew them too. Two of the small trading firms that started life on that floor, Optiver and IMC, grew into global market makers that now trade on exchanges around the world. Four centuries after the option dealers of the VOC era, Amsterdam was again exporting option traders.

The retail boom of the 1990s produced a very Dutch mania. In July 1997, holidaymakers placed orders from their campsites by mobile phone, the index jumped 14% in a month, and on 7 August it closed above 1,000 in guilder terms, a peak of 1,010.97. The papers named it the campinghausse, the camping boom. It faded almost as quickly. Converted to euros, that peak was about 454.

From Floor to Screen: Euronext

The AEX index was launched in 1983 with a base of 100, tracking the largest and most traded Dutch shares. In 1997 the stock and options exchanges merged into a single company, Amsterdam Exchanges NV, and for the first time the Dutch market was run by a profit-seeking business rather than by its members. Supervision passed to independent regulators.

Three years later, in September 2000, Amsterdam joined the Brussels and Paris exchanges to form Euronext, the first cross-border exchange in Europe. Lisbon and the London derivatives exchange LIFFE joined in 2002, and that same year floor trading in Amsterdam ended for good. The shouting traders in coloured jackets gave way to people sitting quietly at screens. Euronext merged with the New York Stock Exchange in 2007, was taken over with it by Intercontinental Exchange, and was spun out again as an independent company in 2014. Since then it has added Dublin in 2018, Oslo in 2019 and Milan in 2021.

The Twenty-One-Year Round Trip

The dot-com boom lifted the AEX above 700 in 2000, led by technology, telecom and financial shares. Then it fell for three years. By March 2003 the index had bottomed at 218, a loss of more than two thirds.

What happened next is the part worth remembering. The AEX did not get back above 700 until 2021. Anyone who bought the Dutch market at the top of the dot-com boom waited twenty-one years to see their price again, before dividends, through the financial crisis of 2008 and the eurozone crisis that followed. It is Amsterdam’s version of the Nasdaq after 2000 and the Nikkei after 1989, and a reminder that the idea that the market always comes back is only true if you are prepared to wait a very long time. For a trader, the lesson is simpler: position size and stop discipline are what stop a bad entry becoming a lost decade.

2021: Amsterdam Overtakes London

On 1 January 2021 the Brexit transition period ended and the United Kingdom lost access to EU financial markets without an equivalence agreement. Under EU rules, euro-denominated shares had to be traded on venues inside the EU. Trading platforms had been preparing for years, and overnight the order books moved.

In January 2021, according to Cboe Europe data reported by the Financial Times, an average of €9.2 billion of shares a day traded in Amsterdam, across Euronext Amsterdam and the Dutch arms of Cboe Europe and Turquoise, more than four times the December level. London’s volume halved to €8.6 billion. For the first time since the seventeenth century, Amsterdam was Europe’s largest share-trading centre, and it held the lead through 2021. Analysts pointed out that very few jobs had actually moved: the trading engines had changed address, the traders mostly had not. But the symbolism was hard to miss. You can read the other side of the story in our history of the London Stock Exchange.

The flows did not all run one way. Unilever unified its Anglo-Dutch structure under its British company in 2020, and Shell dropped its Dutch structure and moved its headquarters to London in 2022. Meanwhile Adyen, the payments company, had listed in Amsterdam in 2018 and Universal Music Group followed in 2021. Markets compete for companies the way companies compete for customers.

The AEX at 1,000

The AEX, now made up of the thirty largest and most actively traded companies on Euronext Amsterdam, reached 800 in 2021 and crossed 900 for the first time in May 2024. On 15 January 2026, after strong results from the Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC lifted ASML, BE Semiconductor and ASM International, the AEX closed above 1,000 in euro terms for the first time, at 1,011.01. It had started the year at 951.29. It first climbed above 1,100 in July 2026 and closed at 1,102.35 on 21 September 2026.

Two things about that index matter more to a trader than its level. First, it is concentrated. ASML alone carries a very large weight, which is why a single chip company’s results can move the whole Dutch market, and why the AEX behaves more like a semiconductor-and-banks index than a portrait of the Dutch economy. Second, its companies are global. Their revenues come from every continent, so the AEX often trades on news from Taipei, Washington and Beijing before it trades on news from The Hague.

How Euronext Amsterdam Works Today

The world’s oldest stock exchange is now an electronic order book run by Euronext from Beursplein 5, and much of the trading in Dutch shares happens on rival platforms such as Cboe Europe as well. Continuous trading in the main market runs from 09:00 to 17:30 Central European Time, after an opening auction, and ends with a short closing auction. Settlement runs through Euroclear Nederland, the descendant of the central securities depository founded in 1977.

Four centuries on, the key institutions are recognisable. The share register is the VOC bookkeeper’s ledger. The central counterparty and the settlement system do the job of the Wisselbank. The AEX options and futures traded on Euronext’s derivatives market are the direct descendants of Le Maire’s forwards and the options de la Vega described in 1688. And the Dutch financial regulator, the AFM, is the latest heir of the edict of 27 February 1610.

How to Trade the AEX

Retail traders usually reach the Dutch market in one of three ways. Index CFDs, often listed by brokers as NL25 or NETH25, track the AEX with small contract sizes and leverage. AEX index futures and options trade on Euronext’s derivatives market, with exchange margin and fixed expiry dates. And individual Dutch shares such as ASML, ING or Heineken can be bought directly through a share-dealing account.

Whichever you use, remember what four centuries of Amsterdam history keep saying about gaps. The cash market opens at 09:00 CET, and news from US chipmakers or Asian results often lands while it is closed, so the index can open well away from yesterday’s close. A stop-loss cannot protect you from a gap. Size every position for the gap, not for the stop, and see our guide to how the London, New York and Asian sessions overlap for the times when European indices move most.

Ten Lessons From Four Centuries of Amsterdam

1. Liquidity is the product. The VOC’s great innovation was a share you could sell. On the day nobody will buy, the exit is theoretical. Money.
2. Every new market invents its abuses within a generation. Le Maire needed only six years. Expect manipulation wherever there is a price. Method.
3. A ban does not change the message. From 1610 to 2020, short-selling bans slowed falls without fixing what caused them. Method.
4. Owners without control get the dividend the managers choose. Le Maire’s complaints of 1609 are still the activist’s checklist. Method.
5. A price can go vertical in a narrow market. Common tulips rose twenty-six-fold in a month and lost most of it in a week. Mind.
6. Check the legend against the record. The tulip story you were told is mostly pamphlet. The real lesson is smaller and sharper. Mind.
7. Never outsource your decision. De la Vega’s first principle, 1688. Mind.
8. Leverage hides in chains. De Neufville ran at twenty-four times capital through bills everyone thought were hedged. Money.
9. A dividend paid out of borrowing is a delay, not a return. The VOC’s last decades proved it. Money.
10. The market comes back, eventually. The AEX took twenty-one years to regain its 2000 peak. Size so that you never need that much patience. Money.

Beneath all ten runs a single current. Within one generation of the first share, Amsterdam’s traders had invented longs, shorts, forwards, options, manipulation, regulation, activism and a mania. Nothing that has happened since, not 1929, not the dot-com bubble, not the crypto manias, introduced a genuinely new behaviour. What you are really trading has never changed: the crowd. Trade it with a repeatable method, strict risk management and a disciplined mind. That framework is Mind, Method and Money, and its first chapter was written, in effect, on the canals of Amsterdam.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the first stock exchange in the world?

The Amsterdam Stock Exchange is generally regarded as the first. It grew up in 1602 around the shares of the Dutch East India Company (VOC), the first company to issue shares to the public that could be freely traded. Trading began in the open air on the New Bridge and Dam Square, and moved into Hendrick de Keyser’s purpose-built exchange in 1611. Its direct descendant is Euronext Amsterdam.

When was the Amsterdam Stock Exchange founded?

The Amsterdam market in company shares dates from 1602, when the VOC held its public share issue in August and allowed its shares to be transferred. The city’s first covered exchange building, where shares and goods were traded, opened in 1611. The market has operated continuously in Amsterdam ever since, through the Zocher exchange of 1845, the Beurs van Berlage of 1903 and Beursplein 5, its home since 1913.

What was the first IPO in history?

The Dutch East India Company’s share issue of August 1602 is generally considered the first initial public offering. Article 10 of its charter allowed all residents of the Dutch Republic to buy shares with no minimum or maximum. In Amsterdam alone, 1,143 investors subscribed 3,674,945 guilders, and the company raised about 6.4 million guilders across its six chambers.

Who was the first short seller?

Isaac Le Maire, a former VOC director, is usually credited as the first. In 1608 and 1609 he organised a syndicate that sold VOC shares for future delivery without owning them, while spreading negative rumours, and the share price fell from about 212% of its issue price to about 126%. The authorities responded on 27 February 1610 with a ban on naked short selling, the first stock market regulation in history.

Was Tulip Mania a real bubble?

Partly. Prices of common tulip bulbs really did rise about twenty-six-fold in January 1637 and then collapse within a week, which even sceptical economists such as Peter Garber cannot explain by fundamentals. But archival research by the historian Anne Goldgar found no documented bankruptcies caused by the crash, a trade limited to a few hundred people, and many of the famous stories coming from moralising pamphlets. Most contracts were settled for between 3.5% and 10% of the agreed price.

What is the oldest share certificate in the world?

The oldest known share certificate is a receipt issued by the Enkhuizen chamber of the VOC on 9 September 1606 to Pieter Harmensz, for the final instalment of his 150-guilder investment. It was discovered in 2010 by a Utrecht University student, Ruben Schalk, in the Westfries Archief in Hoorn.

What is the AEX index?

The AEX is the main index of the Dutch stock market, tracking the thirty largest and most actively traded companies on Euronext Amsterdam, weighted by free-float market value. It was launched in 1983 with a base of 100. It first closed above 1,000 in euro terms on 15 January 2026, at 1,011.01, and first rose above 1,100 in July 2026.

What are the Euronext Amsterdam trading hours?

Continuous trading in shares on Euronext Amsterdam runs from 09:00 to 17:30 Central European Time, Monday to Friday, with an opening auction before 09:00 and a short closing auction after 17:30. Index CFDs and futures on the AEX may trade for longer, but liquidity is deepest while the cash market is open.

How can I trade the Dutch stock market?

Most retail traders use index CFDs on the AEX, usually listed as NL25 or NETH25, through brokers such as XM or Exness, or trade the index on a funded prop firm account. AEX futures and options trade on Euronext’s derivatives market, and individual Dutch shares can be bought through a share-dealing account. Start on a demo account, size every position for the gap at the 09:00 open, and never risk more than 1% of your capital on one trade. (Some of these are partner links; they cost you nothing and help keep our guides free.)

Sources and Further Reading