The Stock Exchange Ticker Tape

New York stock exchange ticker

It isn’t tape and it doesn’t tick but the scrolling series of symbols, abbreviations and numbers you see on the T. V. Stories channels and investment firm display boards tells the play-by-play story of the St. The “ticker tape” was originally a strip of thin paper on which brokers on the floor of the Long Island Stock Exchange spotted transactions. Runners then took those strips to nearby investment houses.

Immediately after the Civil War. Telegram technology made it possible to broadcast short lived info about stocks transactions in Morse Code. The invention of the stock exchange ticker tape machine in 1930 took messengers and Morse out of the equation.

With these machines speculators received information down a leased wire and published it out with a clattering, or ticking, sound onto paper “tape” that slowly unwound from a spool. A new code was developed that provided more information, was better to read and did not need understanding of Morse Code.

Today’s “ticker tape” is more sure to be a computer created graphic crawling across a video screen. After you understand what the abbreviations, symbols and numbers mean, reading the “tape” is simple.

Here’s an example ( employing a made-up security) of ways to read a stock exchange ticker tape:

MAQ 1K @ 19.95 (up arrow) .50

This means: 1,000 shares of a stock with ticker symbol MAQ traded at $19.95 per share, up 50 cents.

When securities change hands, the market moves and the economy is influenced. When its price changes by even a penny the modern, computer generated ticker tracks the sale. That fundamentally is the tale of the stock exchange ticker tape.

Stock trading has its own specialised vocabulary but after you have the basics under your belt you can understand better the way the market works - as significantly you can work the market to your advantage.