What Makes Us Tick? (1952) [video]
I&#x27;m not sure if the Library of Congress website can survive an influx of hacker-news traffic on their video streaming. So I&#x27;ll leave a brief summary here.<p>This 1952 cartoon is a very good explanation of the theory behind the New York Stock Exchange. The first few minutes are a bit of humor to set up Mr. John Q Public who is trying to save up his nest-egg for retirement (roughly the first 3 minutes). This naturally leads him to look into stocks, which the video then explains what stocks are.<p>The remaining 8 minutes of the 11-minute cartoon then goes into the theory of stocks: how stocks raise money for a business (a hypothetical oil-barrel company). First, a private equity raise with a bank ($3-million), and then later, the company IPOs on the NYSE directly for even more money ($20-million). The numbers are small by modern standards (showing off the last 70 years of inflation), but the concept remains the same: investment banks get earlier rounds of investment... and eventually an IPO on the stock exchanges brings in even more money.<p>There&#x27;s also a good segment about what exactly goes on a ticker-tape, who looks at ticker tapes (the various partners of NYSE across the country), who places orders, and what happens on the NYSE floor (how buyers &#x2F; sellers meet up). Modern computers do the same job and faster: broadcasting the last price sold on the exchange, and automatically matching up buy &#x2F; sell orders with each other. As such, the ticker-tape analogy with humans is actually a very good mental model for what these computers are doing.<p>Though many things have changed in the last 70 years, it seems as if the stock market still plays the same role and function today as it did back then.