Freddie Z.

What was the most interesting thing you learned about your topic?

The Toronto Stock Exchange is an important part of our national economy. Although the Exchange is often overlooked in more recent years for other global markets such as the New York Stock Exchange, the TSX has been a crucial catalyst for Canadian innovation, helping spark change throughout the 159 years of its existence.

What important lessons have you learned that you want to share with other Canadians?

I learned that the Toronto Stock Exchange existed before the confederation of Canada. This was interesting to me, as I was thinking of the relation between the Toronto Stock Exchange, and the confederation of Canada and the financial aspects relating to confederation. Another interesting fact I learned while researching my topic is that the Toronto Stock Exchange has the largest amount of mining, oil and gas companies out of any stock exchange in the world. I later found out that this was largely due to the fact that the Toronto Stock Exchange is the result of a merge between a handful of stock exchanges across the country, including the Vancouver and Alberta Stock Exchanges, known for their mining, oil and gas listings.

How would you compare your life today to the lives of those studied in your project?

I would say that my life is much easier than the people I studied in my project. They had to work long hours doing tedious tasks, like cleaning up ticker lines, handwriting stock purchases, and dealing with tangled telephone lines. Today, there is technology that can deal with more tedious and perhaps dangerous tasks, and humans can do some more interesting and thought-oriented work.