80 years of Het Financieele Dagblad

Het Financieele Dagblad (FD) celebrated its 80th birthday today. The leading exchange sector magazine does not want to dwell on it. This may have to do with the special year of birth: 1943. During this war year, the newspaper emerged from a merger forced by the occupying forces of its two predecessors: the Amsterdamsch Effectenblad dating from 1843 and the Dagelijksche Beurscourant annex De Nederlandsche Financier dating from 1864. The merger was related to a general concentration of daily and weekly newspapers in those years.

All things considered, the FD is actually much older than 80 years. It’s 227 years to be precise. In 1843, the Amsterdamsch Effectenblad was a continuation of the Prys-Courant der Effecten by Nicolaas Cotray from 1796. This first regularly published price list received its data from the oldest legal predecessor of Euronext Amsterdam: the Collegie tot Nut des Obligatiehandels. The subtitle ‘Al het geene tot het financie eenige betrekking heeft – sinds 1796’ still points to this origin in the Amsterdam Exchange.

And while the publications of Cotray and the Amsterdamsche Effectenblad were characterised by factual price lists, the merger in 1943 saw the FD gradually follow the line of the Dagelijksche Beurscourant annex De Nederlandsche Financier as a full-fledged editorial newspaper. Or as the FD portrays itself in 2024: the source of news and inspiration for business in the Netherlands.