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The stock market has changed quite a bit since traders first began buying and selling shares in Amsterdam more than 400 years ago.
The attempt to find explanations for why stocks behave the way they do has not.
In 1688, Joseph de la Vega published one of the earliest accounts of the new market that had developed around shares of the Dutch East India Company. In his book, Confusion of Confusions, he wrote that the Dutch traders were “very clever in inventing reasons” for a sudden rise or fall in stock prices.
And some of their explanations would sound perfectly familiar today:
