Wall Street Trivia
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56 free Wall Street trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
This Wall Street trivia quiz covers the eight-block street in Lower Manhattan that became shorthand for American finance. The easy questions are the ones most people know: which city, which exchange, the bronze bull, the movie villain who declared greed good and the crash that ushered in the Great Depression. From there the set digs into the history: the wooden palisade Peter Stuyvesant ordered in 1653, the slave market at the foot of the street, George Washington's inauguration on the Federal Hall balcony, and the 24 brokers who signed the Buttonwood Agreement in 1792. The harder end covers the great shocks and symbols: the 1920 horse-drawn wagon bomb that was never solved, Black Thursday and Black Tuesday in 1929, the 508-point Black Monday of 1987, the guerrilla-art arrival of Charging Bull, Fearless Girl and the sculptor who wanted her gone, Occupy Wall Street's 59 days in Zuccotti Park, the opening and closing bells, the first woman to buy a seat on the exchange and the real financiers behind Gordon Gekko. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the street, the exchange, the crashes, the sculptures and the films before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our New York City, The Wolf of Wall Street and American history quizzes next.
30 of 56 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01On Wall Street a rising market is a bull market, while a falling market is named after which animal?
Bear
Bear most likely comes from the proverb about selling the bearskin before catching the bear: London's 'bearskin jobbers' of the early 1700s sold shares they did not yet own, betting on a fall.
Q 02Wall Street's 'blue chip' stocks take their name from the most valuable chip in which game?
Poker
Poker's priciest chip was borrowed, the story goes, by a Wall Street Journal reporter for stocks trading at $200 or more, so the label first meant expensive stocks; only later did it come to mean dependable ones.
Q 03The Dutch called Wall Street Het Cingel, a name shared with an Amsterdam canal that began as the city's what?
Moat
Moat: the Singel once ringed medieval Amsterdam's walls. New Amsterdam did have a Waal Straat, but it was the wharf street, now part of Pearl Street, which later historians confused with Wall Street.
Q 04In 1653 the Dutch built Wall Street's wall chiefly to keep out which European rival?
The English
The English attack feared from New England never came; when they finally took the town in 1664 they arrived by sea, and it surrendered to their warships without a battle.
Q 05Which Dutch colonial leader ordered the building of the wall that gave Wall Street its name?
Peter Stuyvesant
Peter Stuyvesant called an emergency meeting in March 1653, and the order soon went out that the citizens, without exception, must turn out and work on the defences.
Q 06What was the Dutch wall that gave Wall Street its name originally made of?
Dirt and wooden planks
Dirt and wooden planks formed a nine-foot barrier, raised partly by enslaved Africans. It was pulled down in 1699, but the street that ran beside it kept the name.
Q 07What did New York's Common Council establish at the foot of Wall Street in 1711?
The city's first official slave market
The city's first official slave market stood at Wall and Pearl streets until 1762, and the city collected tax on every person sold there.
Q 08Which event took place on the balcony of Wall Street's Federal Hall in April 1789?
George Washington's first inauguration
George Washington's first inauguration took place on a building that is gone: the original Federal Hall was demolished in 1812, and a later building now stands on the site.
Q 09Which founding father is buried in Trinity Churchyard at the head of Wall Street?
Alexander Hamilton
Alexander Hamilton was buried here in 1804 after his duel with Aaron Burr. His wife Eliza, who outlived him by 50 years, lies beside him.
Q 10What did the 24 brokers who founded the New York Stock Exchange in 1792 agree to fix?
A minimum commission
A minimum commission of a quarter of one percent was one of the pact's two promises; the other was to favour each other. Fixed commissions survived until 1 May 1975.
Q 11The 1792 pact that created the New York Stock Exchange is named after which kind of tree?
Buttonwood
Buttonwood is an old name for the sycamore under which, by tradition, the brokers met outside 68 Wall Street. A year later they moved indoors to the Tontine Coffee House.
Q 12What did Abbie Hoffman and fellow protesters shower on New York Stock Exchange traders from the visitors' gallery in 1967?
Dollar bills
Dollar bills fluttered down and some traders scrambled to grab them, just the picture Hoffman wanted. The exchange soon enclosed the gallery behind bulletproof glass.
Q 13What is the nickname of the New York Stock Exchange?
The Big Board
Q 21What first forced the New York Stock Exchange to shut its trading floor while trading carried on electronically?
The COVID-19 pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic: after two people tested positive at its door screenings, the floor went dark from 23 March to 26 May 2020. Earlier shutdowns, as after 9/11, had stopped trading altogether.
Q 22What did Wall Street do the morning after a bomb killed dozens there in September 1920?
Opened for business as usual
Opened for business as usual: crews cleaned the street overnight so trading could resume, sweeping away physical evidence in a case that was never solved.
Q 23How was the 1920 Wall Street bomb delivered?
The Big Board is the NYSE. Its smaller rival, the American Stock Exchange, was long known as the Curb, and in 2008 the Big Board's parent company bought it.
Q 14Which company that began as an online energy market agreed in 2012 to buy the New York Stock Exchange's parent?
Intercontinental Exchange
Intercontinental Exchange was only 12 years old when it struck the deal, swallowing an institution that traces its roots to 1792.
Q 15The first guest to ring the New York Stock Exchange's opening bell, in 1956, was a 10-year-old who had won what?
A television quiz show
A television quiz show: ten-year-old Leonard Ross won it by answering questions about the stock market, so the exchange made him its first guest bell-ringer.
Q 16At what time does the New York Stock Exchange's opening bell ring each trading day, New York time?
9:30 am
9:30 am opens the trading day and 4 pm closes it; the exchange says the bells exist so that no trade happens before the open or after the close.
Q 17What colour is the button that rings the New York Stock Exchange's main opening and closing bell?
Green
Green rings the main bell. Orange and red buttons sit beside it, the red one a backup in case the main bell fails.
Q 18What did the New York Stock Exchange first use to signal the start and end of trading, long before its bell?
A gavel
A gavel came first, then a Chinese gong in the 1870s, and the brass bell only when the exchange moved into its present building. The gavel is still struck at the close.
Q 19In 1967, Muriel Siebert became the first woman to do what?
Join the New York Stock Exchange
Join the New York Stock Exchange: nine men refused to sponsor her application, and for almost a decade she was the only woman among 1,365 male members.
Q 20Which activist group chained itself to the New York Stock Exchange balcony in 1989 under a banner reading SELL WELLCOME?
ACT UP
ACT UP was protesting the price of the AIDS drug AZT, and its foghorns drowned out the opening bell. Within days the maker, Burroughs Wellcome, cut the price.
In a horse-drawn wagon
In a horse-drawn wagon: the driver climbed down and disappeared into the lunchtime crowd, and minutes later the cart exploded in a hail of metal.
Q 24Which group do historians believe planted the 1920 Wall Street bomb, a crime never officially solved?
Italian anarchists
Italian anarchists who followed Luigi Galleani are the chief suspects: flyers found nearby, signed American Anarchist Fighters, demanded the release of political prisoners.
Q 25Which skyscraper beat 40 Wall Street to the title of world's tallest with a spire hidden inside its crown?
The Chrysler Building
The Chrysler Building: its architect had a spire built in secret inside the crown, then raised it to 1,046 feet to take the title. The Bank of Manhattan tower, later the Trump Building, was left second.
Q 26Which show-business paper summed up the 1929 crash with the headline 'Wall St. Lays an Egg'?
Variety
Variety ran it across its front page on October 30, 1929, in the week the market collapsed. To lay an egg is slang for flopping badly, as a show does.
Q 27Who was US president when the Dow finally climbed back to its 1929 peak, 25 years after the crash?
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower: the Dow did not pass its 1929 peak until 23 November 1954. By July 1932 it had lost 89 percent, so it had to rise ninefold just to get back.
Q 28Which president's father, a famed 1920s stock speculator, became the first chairman of the SEC, Wall Street's new watchdog, in 1934?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy's father, Joseph, had grown rich on market tactics that were then legal. As the SEC's first chairman he outlawed the very practices that had made his fortune.
Q 29What did Wall Street's leading bankers do in October 1929 to try to stop the panic?
Bought shares above market price
They bought shares above market price: the exchange's vice president walked onto the floor and bid high for U.S. Steel with the bankers' money behind him. Prices steadied that day, then collapsed the next week.
Q 30Days before the 1929 crash, Yale economist Irving Fisher said stock prices had reached a 'permanently high' what?
Plateau
Plateau: Irving Fisher said so at a New York dinner in mid-October 1929. Within two weeks the market had collapsed, taking much of his own fortune with it.