Tale of the Tape - The Stock Market Ticker Tape

It isn't tape and it doesn't tick but the scrolling serieseasier to read and didn't require knowledge of Morse
of symbols, abbreviations and numbers you see onCode.
TV news channels and investment firm displayToday's "ticker tape" is more likely to be a
boards tells the play-by-play story of Wall Street.computer-generated graphic crawling across a video
The "ticker tape" was originally a strip of thin paperscreen. Once you understand what the abbreviations,
on which brokers on the floor of the New Yorksymbols and numbers mean, reading the "tape" is
Stock Exchange noted transactions. Runners thensimple.
took those strips to nearby investment houses.Here's an example (using a made-up security) of how
Immediately after the Civil War. telegraph technologyto read a stock market ticker tape:
made it possible to transmit brief information aboutMAQ 1K @ 19.95 (up arrow) .50
securities transactions in Morse Code. The inventionThis means: 1,000 shares of a stock with ticker
of the stock market ticker tape machine in 1930symbol MAQ traded at $19.95 per share, up fifty
took messengers and Morse out of the equation.cents.
With these machines investors received informationWhen securities change hands, the market moves
down a leased wire and printed it out with aand the economy is affected. When its price changes
clattering, or ticking, sound onto paper "tape" thatby even a penny the modern, computer-generated
slowly unwound from a spool. A new code wasticker tracks the sale. That essentially is the tale of
developed that provided more information, wasthe ticker tape.