Identifying the single oldest stock still traded involves looking back to the origins of modern capital markets in the early seventeenth century with the establishment of the Dutch East India Company, commonly known as the VOC, in 1602. It issued the world's first officially recorded publicly traded shares, which were bought and sold on the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. While the original VOC corporation was dissolved at the end of the eighteenth century, various ancient corporate entities and early banking institutions, such as certain historic European and early American banks like The Bank of New York Mellon, trace their lineage or continuous public trading history back centuries, representing the oldest surviving equities in modern financial markets.