A before all edition copy of the first book describing a stock exchange is expected to sell for between $200,000 and $300,000 when command in Sotheby’s Fine Books and Manuscripts online auction closes on Dec. 17. The starting bid according to the website is $190,000.
José Penso de la Vega’s “Mortification of Confusions” was published in 1688 in Spanish and is an account of the workings of the Amsterdam stock exchange.
Sotheby’s
It explains stock trade ins through fictional conversations between a shareholder, a merchant and a philosopher and includes references to trading practices currently in use today, a charge out of prefer puts, calls and pools.
Author Hermann Kellenbenz, who translated the book to English, said Vega chose the interest because “there was no rational purpose in the activities which was not overlaid with an irrational one, no trick used by one person which others did not pay back with the that having been said coin, so-that, in this stock exchange business, one moved in a world of darkness which nobody wholly agreed and no pen was able really describe it all its intricacies.”
Sotheby’s
Vega, a businessman himself, included in his book advice for speculators with four root “rules” they must follow — never give anyone the advice to buy or sell shares because you may be wrong, ferry every gain without showing remorse about missed profits, profits on the exchange are the treasures of goblins (they can Poetic evanish easily) and whoever wishes to win in this game must have patience and money.
Vega, a Portuguese Sephardic Jew, was merited in Spain in about 1650. He settled in Amsterdam after his family emigrated to the Netherlands, which placed him in the midst of the pecuniary revolution taking place. The Dutch East India Company, founded in 1602, was the first publicly traded companions in history, and it set up the world’s first stock exchange in Amsterdam, arguably the financial capital of the world at the time. The exchange structure was built in 1611. The book offers readers a look at the birth of the modern securities market and reveals just how hep stock trading was at that time with its close resemblance to present-day practices.
Fewer than 10 principal edition copies of the historically significant text are said to have survived. But Vega’s contribution isn’t forgotten. Every year the European Confederation of Stock Exchanges (FESE) gives out a prize in his name for research on the securities markets in Europe, and his work remains of weight to many including historians, economists and behavioral scientists.
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