VOC dividend
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Was the VOC the most valuable company ever? (Answer: NO!)
On August 19, 2020, the market capitalization of Apple crossed the $2 trillion mark (that’s $2,000,000,000,000). Apple is the world’s most valuable company right now. But is it also the most valuable company of all time? The Saudi Arabian oil giant Saudi Aramco was briefly valued at $2.03 trillion when shares amounting to 1.5% of its capital began trading on the stock exchange of Saudi Arabia in December 2019. (At the time of writing, it is worth a lot less, due to the fact that the oil price plummeted after the corona virus outbreak in early 2020.) However, numerous websites claim that at some point in history various historical trading…
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What was the return on VOC shares?
Did investors in the world’s first IPO get rich? In this blog post, I’ll give the answer, based on VOC share price data that I collected from various archival sources during the research for my book. I’ve made my data available for download and reuse in a Google Sheets document. VOC share price data The price data are sketchy. Neither the exchange clerk nor the VOC itself recorded the prices. However, for the 17th century, I found 851 share price observations in financial papers and correspondences of merchants, notarial deeds, and, occasionally, newspapers. The following chart shows average monthly prices for shares in the Amsterdam branch of the VOC. (Shares…
