The Old New York Stock Exchange, 1815–1925

What the index registers

Where the record is blank

Twenty-nine months in 111 years carry no quotation at all, and they are not all the same kind of silence.

The 1914 gap is history rather than a defect: the NYSE suspended trading on 31 July 1914 as the European exchanges closed, and did not resume in full until December.

The other twenty-four months were long described here as having no surviving price list. That is no longer true. The New-York Shipping and Commercial List — a twice-weekly paper carrying the quotations “corrected yesterday by the New-York Stock and Exchange Board” — was digitised by FRASER at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and covers twenty-three of the twenty-four. Those months have now been transcribed and are published below as a separate file. Only December 1858 remains without a located source.

The published index still carries a return through every gap by spreading the across-gap return geometrically over the missing months, which is why the series never shows a jump at a reopening. The new transcription is not folded into that index.

A database assembled by hand from newspaper columns accumulates transcription error, and a price-weighted index is unforgiving of it: one stray digit in one stock moves the whole market. The August 2020 revision documents forty-odd such corrections. Two of them dominate everything else.

Neighbouring months put Metropolitan Bank near $106 and Illinois State Bank near $10; both entries were withdrawn. Sources: revision notes, August 2020 and update notes, September 2021.

The cost of two digits

Those two entries alone are the difference between a market that compounds gently upward and one that appears to lose almost everything. On the 2015 data the index shows a +951% month in December 1853 and a −93% month in January 1854 — a round trip that never happened — and annualised volatility of 97.0% against 12.9% after correction.

The September 2021 update went the other way and added data rather than removing it: 950 prices recovered from the Commercial and Financial Chronicle on HathiTrust, filling months that had been empty in 1866–67, 1893, 1897, 1906, 1913, 1914, 1918 and 1923. Rebuilding the index on the fuller data lifts long-run appreciation from 1.57% to 1.61% a year.

Twenty-three of the twenty-four blank months have now been transcribed from the New-York Shipping and Commercial List, which printed the Board’s quotations twice a week from 1815. The 1817 and 1822 tables give a bid and an ask for a standing list of securities, with a “sales” annotation marking where a trade actually took place. By 1848 the paper had switched to printing actual transactions with volume instead, so those months carry traded prices rather than quotations.

Prices follow the rule used for the original database: the transaction price where one is printed, otherwise the average of bid and ask.

Securities are identified by the codes of Sylla, Wilson and Wright, Price Quotations in Early United States Securities Markets, 1790–1860 (ICPSR 4053), so the file merges directly with theirs. The US federal loans, which their New York set does not carry, are given codes of their own anchored on Bayley’s National Loans of the United States (1882).

Read this before using it

This file is machine transcription, not hand-verified data, and it is deliberately kept separate from the monthly price database rather than merged into it.

Each page was read three times independently and the majority value taken. Where the three readings disagreed, the row is flagged: 74% of the published observations had all three agree, the remaining 26% did not and are marked passes disagreed – unverified in the confidence column.

Agreement is not proof. On a hand-check of two 1817 issues, about one cell in eight that the transcription was confident about still needed correcting. Whole numbers are considerably more reliable than the fractions: readings agree on the whole number 93–95% of the time and within one point 95% of the time, so treat the prices as good to about half a point, not to the fraction.

April 1817 is withheld. That issue set the table sideways across the foot of the page and the transcription is not good enough to publish; it needs to be keyed by hand. December 1858 has no digitised source. Full method, measured error rates and the security crosswalk accompany the download.