Stock Quotes and the Ticker Tape

If you happen to tune in to a financial news channel or watch the business news, do you notice those seemingly endless line of numbers and symbols streaming at the bottom of your TV screens? That's called a ticker tape and it provides up-to-date stock quotes on the latest trading activity.

The ticker tape started out in the 1800s as an actual tape of thin paper where the latest stock quotes were printed. The printouts were then delivered by messengers to the brokers' office. In order to get the dibs on the most recent stock quotes, brokers arranged for their offices to be located near the stock exchange building.

Innovations were introduced to the system in the 1930s with the advent of ticker tape machines and delivery of information on stock quotes became much faster. It was only in the 1990s though that a real-time ticker was introduced on the trading floor. It is through the electronic ticker that real-time stock quotes are delivered to news wires, television networks, and online resources.

A ticker tape typically contains the ticker symbol or the characters which are used to identify a company (example: MSFT for Microsoft), the last bid price (29.08 per share), the change amount or the price difference from the previous trading day's close (-0.16), and the change direction which tells whether the stock is trading lower or higher that the previous day (in this case, it's a downward arrow).

Stock quotes for each company are color-coded as well. Stocks in green are those which are trading higher that the previous day, those in red are stocks which are trading lower, and blue or white stock quotes indicate that the price remains unchanged.