Amsterdam as the cradle of modern futures and options trading ...

was completed and written up in the business ledgers, merchants simply tore up the original
contracts. The few contracts that have passed down to our times relate without exception to
transactions that were not, or not properly completed.
One such event was the untimely death of Hans Thijs, an Amsterdam merchant who
was killed in a shipping accident in September 1611. His business papers and the ledgers of
the VOC show this merchant bought and sold more than twenty shares in various chambers of
the company without ever passing before a notary. 81 Among the unsettled contracts in his
estate are a handwritten forward, signed only weeks before his death, and a handwritten future
from December 1610, stipulating the transfer to a third party of a forward contract negotiated
the year before. 82 These documents make it clear that the emergence of neither forwards nor
futures hinged on the availability of standardized, printed contracts. 83 To certify the
transaction it sufficed that “... two duplicate contracts were made, cut in half through ABCD
and signed by both parties respectively.” 84
The first reference to printed contracts is found in a notarial deed written after the
failure of Amsterdam’s first bear syndicate in the spring of 1610. The bankruptcy of the
bookkeeper and various members of the syndicate led to a host of declarations regarding
contracts that had not been fulfilled. Most of these deeds refer to notarized or private contracts
but in one attestation a merchant from Dordrecht mentioned “forty pieces of printed contracts
for shares”. Perhaps to save the trouble of traveling to Amsterdam, he had left them in the
hands of the syndicate’s bookkeeper in 1609. 85 For a time, private handwritten and notarized
contracts appear to have circulated alongside each other, but printed forms presumably
predominated by 1620. 86 Thus the survival of what today are the world’s oldest printed
forward contracts was a matter of chance. 87 In 1635, the heirs of a merchant who had written
two forwards in 1629 appeared before a notary to try and force the reluctant other party, a
merchant who in the meantime had moved to Maastricht, to accept a settlement. As proof of
the transaction, the two printed forms were attached to the notarial deed.
Besides written proof of their transactions, traders had to make arrangements for the
payment of their contracts. 88 The dearth of cash and the hassle of repeated bank transfers put a
premium on devices to cancel out transactions against each other. At first, individual
merchants privately arranged the settlement of mutual claims. 89 Sometimes groups of
merchants organized clearing together. For example, shortly before Lemaire’s bear syndicate
was dissolved in 1610, the members agreed to stop buying and selling and ‘merely settle the
lots to be delivered with the lots to be received.’ 90 Such private arrangements of course only
covered the transactions of a specific group, not of the market as a whole.
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