Of course, such a paper couldn’t solve every problem for a nascent financial market. Insider trading—especially in the smaller joint-stock companies that never made it onto Castaing’s list—remained a constant danger. Rumors could swamp the kind of hard data Castaing tried to gather. Outright frauds certainly occurred. But The Course of the Exchange gave the market its memory and, effectively, reported on the insight of the hundreds of individual traders making bets on what would happen next, tomorrow and for years to come.
