The Zurich exchange after 1914

War, closure and a new building

The First World War interrupted a market that had grown steadily for three decades. When war broke out in the summer of 1914, trading was suspended in Basel and Zurich until early 1915, while Geneva and Lausanne restricted business to fixed-interest securities. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland records that the Second World War brought comparable disruption, when the exchanges were at times closed by agreement with the Swiss National Bank.¹ Both interruptions show how closely the Swiss exchanges were tied to the policy of the central bank and to the fate of the franc. In an economy whose currency served as a refuge during both wars, the authorities regarded an uncontrolled securities market as a risk to monetary stability, which is why an exchange could be closed by agreement in a way that would be unthinkable under today’s law.

The interwar years brought the Zurich exchange a new home. The hall on the Bahnhofstrasse, opened in 1880, had long been too small for the volume of business that the market attracted after 1900. Between 1928 and 1930 the Zurich firm of Henauer and Witschi built a new exchange building near the Bleicherweg, a sober structure in the style of the New Objectivity that contained a main trading hall with a securities exchange above it, surrounded by offices. It remained the largest securities trading venue in Switzerland until 1992.² In 1931 the painter Augusto Giacometti received the commission for a mural in the hall of the so-called Friday exchange. He painted a world map in the Mercator projection, about eighteen metres wide, in egg tempera over three and a half months of work, as a symbol of the global reach of trade. The building, which today belongs to the pension fund of the canton of Zurich, was placed under heritage protection in 1992, although the mural has almost disappeared from view behind the fittings of an event venue.³

The building expressed the self-confidence of a financial centre that had emerged from the First World War strengthened. Switzerland’s neutrality, the stability of the franc and the inflow of capital from neighbouring countries in turmoil made Zurich a market for foreign as well as domestic securities. Giacometti’s map carried a message: it told the traders in the hall that their market belonged to the world economy. The same building would witness, within a few years of its opening, the collapse of that world economy in the Great Depression.

Ring trading and the crises of the century

Trading in Zurich, as in the other Swiss exchanges, took the form of open outcry at the ring. Traders employed by the member banks stood around a circular barrier and called out bids and offers, which were recorded by exchange officials and published as official prices. The method had changed little since the nineteenth century. The session was short, confined to the morning, and securities were called one after another in a fixed order, so that each share or bond had its moment in the ring before the market moved on.⁴ The procedure concentrated liquidity in a single place and at a single time, which suited a market in which the big banks held the bulk of client orders and could match many of them internally before they ever reached the ring.

The ring experienced every crisis of the century. The crash of October 1929 in New York spread to Zurich as it did to every other European market. The depression of the 1930s, the devaluation of the franc in September 1936 and the threat of war kept the Swiss exchanges subdued until the late 1940s. After the war, the exchange grew with the Swiss economy. The veterans of the Zurich ring remember 1962 as the year of a sharp fall in prices, triggered by measures to restrain the overheating economy, by a crash in New York and by the Cuban missile crisis, and 1974 as a year in which the pressure on the market during the oil crisis was so heavy that there was talk of closing the exchanges.⁵

The last great crash of the ring era came on 19 October 1987, when the fall of the New York market spread around the world within hours. Swiss share prices fell heavily in October and November 1987. The episode strengthened the conviction among Swiss bankers that a market dependent on physical presence at a ring in the morning could not respond adequately to shocks that now travelled across time zones by telephone and screen.⁶ Since the planning of SOFFEX had begun before the crash, the electronic exchange owed its origin to other causes. The experience of 1987 nevertheless gave its advocates a persuasive argument.

Ticker, television and Telekurs

A less visible but equally lasting innovation of the interwar years concerned the distribution of prices. In 1930 the banks of Zurich founded Ticker AG to transmit the prices of the Zurich exchange to subscribers by a telegraph-like technology. The Historical Dictionary describes the company as a European pioneer. In 1961 Ticker AG turned to television technology and became Telekurs AG. A year later Basel and Zurich introduced exchange television, which displayed prices on screens in the offices of the banks.⁷ In 1964 Telekurs was given the task of examining how information technology could be used in securities trading, although computerisation made real progress only in the 1980s.⁸

Telekurs matters to the history of SIX for a simple reason. It was one of the three companies whose merger in 2008 created SIX Group. The financial information business that SIX operates today, which supplies reference data and prices on millions of instruments to banks around the world, grew out of the ticker of 1930. SIX itself describes its origins as reaching back to around 1930.⁹ The oldest continuous thread in the Swiss market infrastructure is therefore information, a fitting ancestry for an industry in which data has become one of the most profitable products.

Notes

1. Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), Elisabeth Meyerhans, “Börsen”, version of 2004, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013741/. The article also records the foundation of Ticker AG in 1930, its conversion into Telekurs AG in 1961, the end of ring trading on the smaller exchanges in 1991 and the replacement of the cantonal laws by federal law in 1997. ↩
2. Wikipedia (German), “Alte Börse (Zürich)”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alte_B%C3%B6rse_(Z%C3%BCrich). The article was consulted for orientation. It gives the construction period 1928–1930, names Henauer und Witschi as architects, and dates the move of the exchange to its new building near the Stauffacher bridge to 1992. ↩
3. Neue Zürcher Zeitung (NZZ), “Das verborgene Meisterwerk von Augusto Giacometti”, https://www.nzz.ch/zuerich/das-unsichtbare-meisterwerk-ld.1355999. The article describes the exchange building of Henauer & Witschi as “neusachlich”, gives the dimensions and technique of the mural and notes that the building is owned by the BVK, the pension fund of the canton of Zurich. ↩
4. Swiss Finance Museum (Schweizer Finanzmuseum), “The history of trading”, description of guided tour, https://www.finanzmuseum.ch/en/home/visit/guided-tours/history-of-trading.html. ↩
5. Verein ehemaliger Zürcher Ringhändler (VeZR), “Die Börse”, https://vezr.ch/DIE-BOeRSE/. The association of former Zurich ring traders also records the introduction of exchange television in Basel and Zurich in 1962, the opening of the building at Selnaustrasse 32 in 1991, the start of electronic trading and the last ring bell on 15 August 1996. ↩
6. Année politique suisse (Institut für Politikwissenschaft, Universität Bern), “Einbruch der Aktienkurse am 19. Oktober 1987”, https://politchronik.swiss/fr/prozesse/15040-einbruch-der-aktienkurse-am-19-oktober-1987.pdf. Measured by the index of the Swiss Bank Corporation, Swiss share prices fell by eleven per cent on 19 October 1987. By the end of the year they stood about 25 per cent below their level before the crash. The Swiss Market Index did not yet exist in October 1987 (it was launched on 30 June 1988). ↩
7. HLS, Meyerhans, “Börsen”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013741/, and VeZR, “Die Börse”, https://vezr.ch/DIE-BOeRSE/, both of which describe exchange television as a world first. ↩
8. Wikipedia (German), “SIX Swiss Exchange”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/SIX_Swiss_Exchange, consulted for orientation on the chronology from exchange television to electronic trading. ↩
9. SIX Group, “Company”, https://www.six-group.com/en/company.html. SIX describes itself as formed from the merger of financial companies “with their beginnings going back to around 1930” and states that it is owned by around 120 national and international financial institutions. ↩

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.