The Budapest Exchange Museum project

Abstract

The Budapest Exchange Museum portal – presenting the results of a research project launched eight years ago – went officially live as part of a half-day conference on 18 January 2024, the 160th anniversary of the foundation of the former Budapest Commodities and Stock Exchange. The portal was created to promote further high-quality research into financial and economic history as well as to pay tribute to this emblematic institute of Hungarian economic history that has overcome numerous ordeals during its 160 years of operation. The original objective of the project was to quantify the long-term returns of financial investments, an interesting topic from both a theoretical and a practical point of view. In the first phase, we collected and digitalised the data required for these calculations. The second phase continued with the development of the portal, the compilation of a database from the available data and starting the research on returns. While studying the data, we realized how many companies and persons who had played a major role in the past have faded into oblivion. This inspired us to extend our research project by the current third phase which centres around the history of the 100 most prominent companies and the personalities associated with them. This paper summarises the background and current results of the project as well as future plans.