A closer look
Dutch merchant Adriaen van Ketwich launched the world's very first mutual fund in seventeen seventy-four as a desperate response to a brutal European financial crisis, brilliantly allowing regular small-time investors to pool their limited cash together and spread their terrible market bets across a diverse portfolio of colonial bonds rather than wildly risking their entire life savings on a single doomed maritime expedition, which laid the absolute foundation for the modern retirement system as a chaotic survival tactic for stressed-out traders trying to avoid going completely bankrupt
