During the 1880s, most of the investing, share buying and selling in the U.S. took place in New York, at the famous Wall Street stock exchange. Yet a group of thrifty German immigrants saw an opportunity for a smaller, regional one. Growing up on stories of a land of unlimited opportunity, where anyone, regardless or race, creed or religion, could make a good life if they were willing to work hard and live thriftily, the German immigrants saw California as just such a land. The newly-formed state needed gas and electricity. And somebody to finance those projects.

On this day, September 19, in 1882, the San Francisco Stock and Bond Exchange, later to merge with a Los Angeles trading house to become the Pacific Coast Stock Exchange (and even later dropping the “Coast”), began operations.

For most of its history the company was mutualized, with private, select ownership, but in 1999 it began to demutualize — the first stock exchange to do so. The trading floors on San Francisco and Los Angeles were both closed, and the properties sold. Trading began to be exclusively electronic — in fact the Pacific Stock Exchange pioneered many of the electronic trading practices common today.