the.com/ticker
A company's name, shrunk to a few letters so you can panic about it faster.
means A ticker is the short letter-code assigned to a publicly traded stock, used to identify it on exchanges and in trading systems instead of spelling out the full company name.
from Comes from the old ticker-tape machine, a telegraph printer that clacked out stock prices and abbreviations on a thin paper strip, the 'ticking' sound of its print mechanism giving both the machine and its codes their name — the same tape, incidentally, that later got thrown from parade windows as ticker-tape confetti.
- origin
- named for machines that literally ticked out prices on paper tape
- length limit
- NYSE caps most tickers at 3 letters, Nasdaq allows 4
- joke tickers
- companies pick symbols like LUV, MOO, or BOOM on purpose
- fun fact
- ticker tape parades are named after that same paper tape