The cantonal law of 1883 on securities brokers and exchange agents

The popular vote of 2 December 1883

The first cantonal statute on the Zurich exchange was adopted by the voters of the canton on 2 December 1883. Its title was “Gesetz über die Gewerbe der Effektensensale und Börsenagenten”, a law on the trades of securities brokers and exchange agents. It was approved by 75.89 per cent of those voting, with a turnout of 74.82 per cent.¹ The use of the referendum for a technical law on securities brokers is characteristic of Zurich after 1869. The democratic constitution required that laws be submitted to the people, so that the regulation of the exchange had to be explained to, and approved by, a mainly rural electorate of farmers, artisans and factory workers. The large majority suggests that the law was understood as a measure of protection against the abuses associated with the crisis of the 1870s.

The title of the statute shows its regulatory approach. Its object was the trade of those who acted as intermediaries, the Effektensensale (securities brokers, in the tradition of the old Sensale) and the Börsenagenten (exchange agents). This was a trade-law approach, a regulation of a Gewerbe, in keeping with the Swiss constitutional principle of freedom of trade and industry. Since the Federal Constitution of 1874 guaranteed that freedom, a canton could regulate the exercise of a trade for reasons of public order, but it could not abolish free access to it. The requirement of a licence for professional intermediaries was therefore the natural instrument. With it the canton could control the persons who acted on the exchange without taking over the market itself.

State-authorised trading from 1884

Trading under the new law began in 1884. The Verein ehemaliger Zürcher Ringhändler, an association of former ring traders, describes 1884 as the year in which the first trading with state authorisation took place in Zurich, under cantonal supervision, in parallel with the Basel exchange that had existed since 1876.² The Swiss Finance Museum similarly states that the Zurich exchange was placed under cantonal supervision in 1884. The centenary history calls the following period “Die Anfänge der Staatsbörse”, the beginnings of the state exchange. The term needs careful reading, since the Effektenbörsenverein continued to organise the market in a building that the canton neither owned nor staffed. “State exchange” meant that trading in securities by professional intermediaries had become a licensed activity, and that the canton now supervised the market and gave official status to its prices.

The statute of 2 December 1883, the Gesetz betreffend die Gewerbe der Effektensensale und Börsenagenten, made the trades of securities broker and exchange agent subject to state authorisation (§ 2). Each broker had to deposit real security of 3,000 to 5,000 francs and each exchange agent security of 10,000 to 20,000 francs (§ 16). The Regierungsrat appointed one or more commissioners to supervise the exchange (§ 12), while the fixing of the securities prices to be published after each exchange meeting was reserved to the licensed brokers (§ 9).³ Official supervision by a Kommissär became a lasting feature of Zurich exchange regulation. The cantonal Wertpapiergesetz of 22 December 1912 still provided for a state Börsenkommissär with the right to attend the exchange meetings and to prevent improper price quotations, and it regulated the official Kursblatt.⁴

The Zurich model compared

The Zurich law of 1883 created a hybrid. A private association operated the market and set its internal rules, while the canton licensed the intermediaries, supervised the market through a public official and gave its prices official status. The Zurich model is best understood against its neighbours. In Geneva the exchange had grown out of an association of agents de change, which obtained cantonal recognition early, in the 1850s. In Basel an exchange under cantonal supervision existed from 1876. On 8 April 1897 the Basel Grand Council enacted a law that nationalised the exchange completely and prohibited private associations of merchants from competing with the state exchange.⁵ The Historisches Lexikon notes that Basel temporarily nationalised its exchange in 1897 in response to the wild speculation of the early Swiss exchanges.⁶

Zurich never went as far as Basel. The canton regulated the persons and supervised the market, but it left the ownership and internal organisation of the exchange to the private association. This moderate course gave Zurich an advantage in the long run. It combined the authority of official prices with the flexibility of a members’ organisation that could adapt its rules to new instruments and new participants. The distinction between the regulation of a market and the operation of a market, which Zurich drew in 1883, is still the basic structure of Swiss financial market law. The modern exchange is a private company authorised and supervised by a public authority, whose own regulatory bodies issue the rules of trading and listing. The cantonal Kommissär of 1884 is the remote ancestor of the supervisory functions now exercised by FINMA, while the self-regulatory tradition of the Effektenbörsenverein lives on in the regulatory bodies of SIX.

Notes

1. “Liste kantonaler Volksabstimmungen des Kantons Zürich”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_kantonaler_Volksabstimmungen_des_Kantons_Z%C3%BCrich, entry for 02.12.1883. ↩
2. Verein ehemaliger Zürcher Ringhändler (VeZR), “Die Börse”, https://vezr.ch/DIE-BOeRSE/. The association adds that the cantons imposed a turnover tax on the exchanges, a point taken up in section XI. ↩
3. Gesetz betreffend die Gewerbe der Effektensensale und Börsenagenten vom 2. Dezember 1883, text of the statute as held by the Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich, https://suche.staatsarchiv.djiktzh.ch/Dateien/107/D536489.pdf, §§ 2, 9, 12 and 16. ↩
4. Gesetz betreffend den gewerbsmässigen Verkehr mit Wertpapieren vom 22. Dezember 1912, in force from 1 January 1913, text held by the Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich, https://suche.staatsarchiv.djiktzh.ch/Dateien/106/D534880.pdf (Börsenkommissär; Kursblatt, § 38). ↩
5. Hans Bauer, Die Basler Börse 1876–1976 (Basel: Birkhäuser, 1976), chapter “Das Börsengesetz vom 8. April 1897”, abstract, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-0348-6298-1_5. Under the Basel law, trading rights were limited to members licensed by the exchange commission, brokers received renewable six-year concessions, and an exchange chamber was composed of representatives of the banks and the securities business together with up to twelve brokers. ↩
6. HLS, Meyerhans, “Börsen”, http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D13741.php. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.