The young man pointed at the Stock Exchange behind him. "Let the British see our determination!
"Since they want to destroy the East India Company, they can forget about getting a single investment from the Netherlands. Come with me and dump your Birmingham Kovac Steel Company shares!"
As the Security Bureau agent charged into the trading hall, hundreds of Amsterdam citizens surged in after him.
They did not seek out stockbrokers. Instead, they withdrew their money from investment firms—most people could not afford even a single trading unit, so investment firms specialized in pooling everyone's small sums to buy stocks.
Naturally, once investment firms received a flood of withdrawal requests, they had no choice but to sell their shares for cash.
The next day, newspapers carried reports of "Birmingham Kovac Steel Company Shares Dumped by Furious Amsterdam Citizens."
The matter had nothing to do with the East India Company and did not fall under news censorship, so quite a few Newspaper Offices joined in, inciting people to take part in the sell-off. In two days, the British steelmaker's share price fell from 760 shares per trading unit to 782 shares.
The strength of ordinary citizens was limited, but the downward trend had begun.
Once the downward trend was in place, De Witt could make his move.
Three days earlier, he had repaid all the "borrowed" East India Company shares and made nearly 100,000 Dutch Guilders from short-selling. Now, his traders took their funds and began searching everywhere for people holding large quantities of Kovac Steel Company shares.
It was the same operation as before. Within a few days, sell orders worth more than a million Dutch Guilders flooded the market, and Kovac Steel Company's share price promptly fell to 1,070 shares per trading unit.
Yes, this company's market value was