Alice doe er wat aanThe Amsterdam stock exchange is considered the oldest in the world, founded in 1602 (link). It escalated pretty quickly, the art of short selling began in 1609. The first European option exchange started in 1978.

Some mergers and spin-offs followed, but The Netherlands has a stock exchange history. While it’s an international company, a lot of Dutch people take a lot of pride in their work at Euronext Amsterdam. People have been fired to cut costs. Replacing them with Google Translate may be cost efficient. It has some downsides though.

EUronext IR looks like Nigerian scam artist

For non-Dutch speakers : the text is embarrassing. Reads like a Nigerian scam artist experimenting with google translate.  Euronext’s website is a mess, but this can be found straight under the investor relations part (link). Suppose the page will be replaced by the English version pretty soon. On the other hand, the text could last for another year.

* Other news *

Source Capital AG folds

Source Capital AG, the Zug based trading firm had a difficult year. Source was founded in 2005 and had close ties with IMC Financial Markets. Shared offices and also received initial funding.

Source has taken a hit by the EURCHF move early this year. Fired some traders, cut some costs. Alas, on November 30th managing director Pieter van Hasselt was forced to shut the doors. This time for real.

iDealing new broker in The Netherlands

With a small marketing effort, including an interview in the newspapers, iDealing promises free trading in stocks. Empty words. You need to cross the bid-ask spread to do a trade – but that’s not the worst thing. No sane Dutch investor would ever join a broker where you are charged €50 for closing an account. Or €5 for withdrawing money.

I predict iDealing will be gone in less than three months, after attracting less than 200 clients.

 

 

Jack