ИСТИНА

This presentation explores the Russian financial market of the 1910s at the micro level. Surprising insights were revealed through the credit accounts of clients of the Ryabushinsky Bank, one of the Moscow joint-stock commercial banks. Our database comprises 419 customers, their 560 credit accounts of 1910 and 1912, as well as 13,413 securities transactions recorded in these accounts. These records reveal that in addition to stockbrokers there were unofficial professional exchange brokers trading for themselves and for customers, often, but not always, using bank loans. In their accounts we can see how they were making a huge turnover of speculative stock trading that was very short-term, within 1-2 days, buying and selling shares (blue chips) only, creating profits from the high turnover. The security prices and trade turnover can be traced daily, and it is clear that such intermediaries set the tone for the Moscow market. Banks were also active participants in the stock market; they not only provided credit to the securities trade and traded on behalf of clients, but also traded on their own account through figureheads or frontmen, and such cases were also revealed in our archival data. At the same time, the bank dealt in new issues of securities of companies affiliated with the bank and the bank distributed these securities among its customers at preferential prices. In addition to banks and professional intermediaries, the credit accounts of Ryabushinsky Bank’s clients show how large firms bought reserves in the form of bonds, and well-to-do Moscow réntiers managed their portfolios of securities, mainly bonds. The bank had many small customers, concerned with both investment and speculation. The Moscow market was the second in the Russian Empire after St. Petersburg, and these markets operated as a single market in fact in the 1910s, which is also proved by the sources. As a result, the article shows that the financial market at the micro level was essentially a more complex system and hierarchy than was originally conceived from traditional sources of securities market research.