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Eight sections, 28 entries. Every one of them is listed here and on the register.
01 · The Certificate
| What 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. |
| Bearer and registered | Whether the paper itself is the claim, or merely evidence of an entry elsewhere. |
| The counterfoil | The stub that stays in the book, and the audit trail it creates. |
| Dematerialisation | The paper leaves and the register remains. |
02 · The Book
| Bid and ask | Two queues facing each other. The gap between the best of each is the spread, and it is the cost of immediacy. |
| Matching rules | Price first, then time. Simple to state, and it determines who trades. |
| Depth | What sits behind the best price, and why size moves it. |
| The empty side | What happens when nobody is willing to take the other end. |
03 · The Room
| Every trade had an address | Open-outcry floors were organised spatially: a pit for each instrument, and position in it mattered. |
| Hand signals | A working sign language developed because shouting did not scale. |
| The room empties | Electronic matching removed the floor and kept the vocabulary. |
04 · Clearing & Settlement
| Why 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. |
| The central counterparty | An institution that stands between both sides so neither has to trust the other. |
| Netting | Thousands of obligations collapsed into a few payments. |
| Failure to deliver | What the plumbing does when something does not arrive. |
05 · The Index
| What an index is | A rule for selecting members and a rule for weighting them. Both are choices, and both change what the number reports. |
| Weighting | By price, by size, or equally — three indices of the same market that disagree. |
| Survivorship | Members leave when they fail, and the record keeps only those who stayed. |
06 · Compounding
| Multiply, do not add | Growth compounds as a product of factors, not a sum of percentages, which is why intuition about it is reliably wrong. |
| The mean of factors | The average that describes compound growth is geometric, and it is always lower than the arithmetic one. |
| A fall needs a bigger rise | Down a half, then up a half, leaves you down a quarter. |
07 · Average & Median
| An average is not an outcome | In a skewed distribution most results sit below the mean, so the average describes almost nobody. |
| The long tail | A few very large values dragging a mean away from the middle. |
| Dispersion | The spread is the information the average threw away. |
08 · Manias
| Tulips, as recorded | What the contemporary records actually show about the Dutch bulb trade, which is narrower and stranger than the popular account. |
| The railway boom | Enormous capital raised for lines that were built, plus lines that were not. |
| The South Sea affair | A debt conversion scheme wrapped in a trading monopoly, and the legislation that followed it. |
| What the accounts record | Where the surviving numbers come from, and their limits. |