For many people the name New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) means "the" stock market. For all intents and purposes, that can be viewed as an accurate statement. The NYSE is the first and oldest stock exchange in the United States, tracing its beginnings back to 1792.

In those days, stock and security traders met on the corner of Wall Street and Broad Street in New York, first to buy and sell government debt securities and later expanding into other stocks and bonds. At the time, New York served as the nation's capital and Congress met in Federal Hall, also on Wall Street.

Buttonwood Agreement

The process became somewhat more organized in 1792 when 24 New York City stockbrokers and merchants signed the Buttonwood Agreement, establishing the New York Stock & Securities Board, the entity now known as the NYSE. A seat on the exchange originally cost $25. With the agreement, trading moved off the street into a rented room in a building at 40 Wall Street. Today the building that stands on the spot is a 71-story skyscraper known as the Trump Building.

Although the exchange was founded in 1792, the date usually given for the beginning of the organization is 1817, the year the exchange adopted its first constitution. The exchange operated in that way until 1971 when it became a not-for-profit corporation. During its history, the cost of a membership to be included in exchange trading has risen from a low of $2,750 in 1871 to a record high of $2.65 million in 1999.

Volume Dealers

Much has changed on the exchange over the past 200 years. It was only in the 20th century that rapid advances and declines hit the market and the most massive swings in volume have come on the dawn of the 21st century. The exchange hit the 1 million mark in shares traded in one day in 1886. Daily volume first hit 2 billion shares in 2001 and the record high of 2.8 billion shares was traded on July 24, 2002. The record low for shares traded in one day was 31 in 1830.

It was not until 1906 that the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA), commonly referred to as the "Dow," hit the 100 mark. The Dow topped 500 in 1956 and that doubled in 1971. During administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, in an age of high inflation and a lagging economy, the Dow first hit the 1,000 mark and the nightly news carried reports if the mark dropped under that benchmark. On an average day today, 1.46 billion shares, valued at $46.1 billion, are traded on the NYSE.

Explosion

That might seem like ancient history to those working "the street" (as Wall Street is called) in an era when the Dow topped 10,000 in 1999. Those were heady days as the market rose and analysts predicted "10K by 2K," meaning they expected the Dow to reach 10,000 by the year 2000. The market beat the prediction by a year.

The last year of the 20th century saw the most volatility on the market as 2000 marked the largest one-day jump in the Dow (499.19 points on March 16) and its biggest one-day drop (617.78 points on April 2000). That year began with the Dow hitting a record high of 11,722.98 on January 14. With the bust of the so-called "internet bubble" and the fall of high technology stocks to more reasonable levels, the market has seen less dramatic ups and downs in the days since.