AEX, The Beginning.

The AEX index, derived from Amsterdam, is a stock market index composed of Dutch companies that trade on Euronext Amsterdam. It started in 1983. It is the biggest stock index in The Netherlands, aswell as in Europe. The total value of all stocks in this index is 250,9 billion euro's.

The AEX index is composed of 25 companies. These companies offer stocks, a share of their company, to people. The price of one stock is based on the index points. So it's best to buy them when the points, so the price, is low, and sell them when the points are high. It sounds simple, but actually it's quite hard. When you buy a stock from wich the price is dropping, you run the risk that it will only drop further. So you need to do a lot of research before buying stocks.

The AEX started from a base level of 100 index points. The index's peak is 703,18 index points, that was reached on 5 september 2000. In the following three years the index's points more then halved. It wasn't untill 2004 that it recovered.

The AEX enjoyed its second largest one-day loss on september 29, 2008. In one day the index closed down almost 9% lower. The period 1998-2008 has been a bad decade for the AEX index. In this decade the AEX was the second worst performing stock index.

The year 2009 has not been a very good year for the AEX aswell. For the first time since years, the index's points got below 300. The cause of this was the financial crisis. A lot of companies who offer their stocks on the AEX got hit hard by the crisis. (In my next blogs I will be telling you more about this.) But in the last few months it recovered and it is stable at around 330 index points.