Downtick

Finance allah shmoop what is ticker tape It's this tick

tick tick you know without the explosion at the end

Okay wavy line time travel dissolve thing Go ahead Back

to nineteen twenty seven Stock information like stock prices used

to be passed along via telegraph machine This thing little

magnets were engaged electronically and the stock prices were printed

on thin paper tape known as ticker tape Yes clever

name However typically only the last numbers would be printed

Like if you had ibm training in one hundred seventy

three dollars Four cents All you would see is that

three Fifty for there on the end Well why would

this happen Well because under this technology the ink and

paper cost off fortune and because there was so much

information to convey well had they spelled out the entire

name of the company rather than the ticker symbol alone

And yes that's how the symbols all came to be

While then that printing would have taken forever just to

send over say an hour's worth of trades And by

the time the prince got done while the trades would

be irrelevant So recycling with all this take laying around

was kind of a thing back then As well And

old ticker tape was used for two things Parades and

well for leper con toilet paper But we don't talk

much about that anyway but more for parade People used

to throw the stuff out of building windows As you

know floats in astronauts and presidents went by Well by

the nineteen sixties the traditional ticker tape parade was no

longer needed There were better and faster ways Teo you

know throw paper and to transmit stock price info Well

today everything's done electronically Thank you The internet No more

dead trees Thank you very much So ticker tape refers

to the stream of stock prices and information that come

through a usually on a mobile device or screen of

some sort today Anyway that's progress worthy of a parade