The complete roster
Register of entries
Everything on this site, in section order. 28 entries across 8 sections, with no dates on any of them.
01 · The Certificate
| Entry | What it describes | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 01 · 1What a certificate is | An engraved share certificate is a receipt for a claim: a stated fraction of a company, with a right to vote and a right to whatever is left after everybody else is paid. The engraving, the seal and the counterfoil are all anti-forgery engineering, and the document itself has now almost entirely disappeared into a register entry. | long |
| 01 · 2Bearer and registered | Whether the paper itself is the claim, or merely evidence of an entry elsewhere. | medium |
| 01 · 3The counterfoil | The stub that stays in the book, and the audit trail it creates. | short |
| 01 · 4Dematerialisation | The paper leaves and the register remains. | short |
02 · The Book
| Entry | What it describes | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 02 · 1Bid and ask | Two queues facing each other. The gap between the best of each is the spread, and it is the cost of immediacy. | medium |
| 02 · 2Matching rules | Price first, then time. Simple to state, and it determines who trades. | medium |
| 02 · 3Depth | What sits behind the best price, and why size moves it. | short |
| 02 · 4The empty side | What happens when nobody is willing to take the other end. | short |
03 · The Room
| Entry | What it describes | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 03 · 1Every trade had an address | Open-outcry floors were organised spatially: a pit for each instrument, and position in it mattered. | medium |
| 03 · 2Hand signals | A working sign language developed because shouting did not scale. | short |
| 03 · 3The room empties | Electronic matching removed the floor and kept the vocabulary. | short |
04 · Clearing & Settlement
| Entry | What it describes | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 04 · 1Why settlement takes days | Between agreeing a trade and exchanging cash for title there is netting, confirmation and delivery. The delay is administrative history, not physics. | medium |
| 04 · 2The central counterparty | An institution that stands between both sides so neither has to trust the other. | medium |
| 04 · 3Netting | Thousands of obligations collapsed into a few payments. | short |
| 04 · 4Failure to deliver | What the plumbing does when something does not arrive. | short |
05 · The Index
| Entry | What it describes | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 05 · 1What an index is | A rule for selecting members and a rule for weighting them. Both are choices, and both change what the number reports. | medium |
| 05 · 2Weighting | By price, by size, or equally — three indices of the same market that disagree. | medium |
| 05 · 3Survivorship | Members leave when they fail, and the record keeps only those who stayed. | short |
06 · Compounding
| Entry | What it describes | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 06 · 1Multiply, do not add | Growth compounds as a product of factors, not a sum of percentages, which is why intuition about it is reliably wrong. | medium |
| 06 · 2The mean of factors | The average that describes compound growth is geometric, and it is always lower than the arithmetic one. | medium |
| 06 · 3A fall needs a bigger rise | Down a half, then up a half, leaves you down a quarter. | short |
07 · Average & Median
| Entry | What it describes | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 07 · 1An average is not an outcome | In a skewed distribution most results sit below the mean, so the average describes almost nobody. | medium |
| 07 · 2The long tail | A few very large values dragging a mean away from the middle. | short |
| 07 · 3Dispersion | The spread is the information the average threw away. | short |
08 · Manias
| Entry | What it describes | Length |
|---|---|---|
| 08 · 1Tulips, as recorded | What the contemporary records actually show about the Dutch bulb trade, which is narrower and stranger than the popular account. | medium |
| 08 · 2The railway boom | Enormous capital raised for lines that were built, plus lines that were not. | medium |
| 08 · 3The South Sea affair | A debt conversion scheme wrapped in a trading monopoly, and the legislation that followed it. | medium |
| 08 · 4What the accounts record | Where the surviving numbers come from, and their limits. | short |