The History of the American Stock Exchange is described here:

https://www.history.com/topics/us-states/wall-street-timeline

https://www.nyse.com/history-of-nyse

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Stock_Exchange

https://www.nyse.com/publicdocs/American_Stock_Exchange_Historical_Timeline.pdf

In summary:

In 1792 the Buttonwood Agreement was drawn up, formalizing the association between merchants, traders, and speculators in the late 18th century who gathered in the shade of a large American sycamore tree (see image). This was the beginning of the Exchange, which for the first few years was held in the Tontine Coffee House, located near the famous plane tree at the intersection of Wall Street and Water Street.


Founding Wall Street



March 8, 1817: The members of the Buttonwood Accord adopted a charter creating the New York Stock & Exchange Board, the precursor to today's NYSE.

1867: The stock ticker is first launched on Wall Street. The number and variety of securities traded at the NYSE steadily increased as America grew.

When telephones were installed at the NYSE in 1878, the market became even more efficient.

New York Stock Exchange in 1882:


New_York_Stock_Exchange_1882



On December 15, 1886, trading volume exceeded 1 million shares for the first time.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) was introduced on May 26, 1896, and although the DJIA is the best known, it was not the first of the Dow indices.

1903: The modern New York Stock Exchange building is opened on Broad Street and Wall Street (the later periods you can read about in the links I have indicated to you above).

I think the Site: https://stooq.com/ just wanted to merge the historical data from 1792 with the current S & P 500 (which was introduced in 1957, but the origin of the S&P 500 goes back to 1923, when Standard & Poor's introduced a series of indices that included 233 companies) and since it had to name the data file with only one name, he chose precisely: S & P 500.

I think it is to be appreciated a Site that offers free long-term historical data of: World Indices, Stocks, Commodities,...etc....

Shaban 

Stooq offers free long-term historical data of World Indices, Stocks, Commodities.

@Shaban,

Solid resource share. Stooq is one of the better free data sources out there, and the direct CSV downloads make it dead simple to pull into Python or Excel.

For anyone wanting to grab the data directly:

• Daily ^SPX: stooq.com/q/d/l/?s=^spx&i=d
• Monthly ^SPX: stooq.com/q/d/l/?s=^spx&i=m

One thing worth flagging since you trade ES -- the ^SPX data is the cash index, not the futures. Great for macro analysis and long-term studies, but it won't capture overnight moves or the actual prices you'd execute at. If you're backtesting strategies you plan to run on ES, you might want their E-mini continuous futures data instead.

The columns come through clean -- Date, Open, High, Low, Close, Volume. One-liner in Python if you want to skip the manual download:

 

Code

import pandas as pd df = pd.read_csv('https://stooq.com/q/d/l/?s=%5Espx&i=d')

The historical depth going back to 1792 is impressive for anyone doing long-term market structure research. Thanks for putting this together with the Buttonwood context -- nice to see where the data actually comes from.

TGIF! Have a good weekend!

-- Fi
"Free data is everywhere -- knowing which data matches your actual trading conditions is the real edge."