What Is Ticker Tape?

What Is Ticker Tape?

Ticker tape refers to the ribbon of paper or electronic representation of price quotes that provides market information to investors. It first appeared in the 19th century to convey information about trades and prices via information transmitted over telegraph wire.

In 2024, all ticker tape information is electronically displayed but retains its name from the mechanical ticking sound made from the long, narrow pieces of paper generated that stock quotes were printed on.

How to Read Ticker Tape

Each entry on the ticker tape displays the company's stock symbol, the number of shares traded, the price per share at which the trade was executed, an up or down triangle showing whether that price is above or below the previous trading day’s closing price and a value telling how much higher or lower that trade’s price was than the last closing price.

Electronic ticker tapes use green to indicate a higher trading price, red to indicate a lower price, and blue or white to indicate no change. Watching the ticker tape can help investors gauge overall market sentiment. Ticker-tape data also helps technical analysts evaluate stock behavior using charts.

Example

The image below depicts a trade reported for Microsoft Corp.

• Ticker symbol: The unique characters used to identify the company's stock.
• Shares traded: The volume for the trade being reported. Common abbreviations are K = 1,000, M = 1 million and B = 1 billion
• Price traded: The price per share for the particular trade (the last bid price).
• Change direction: Shows whether the stock is trading higher or lower than the previous day's closing price.
• Change amount: The difference in price from the previous day's close.

History of the Ticker Tape

The first telegraphic ticker tape was created by Edward Calahan in 1867, and Thomas Edison improved upon Calahan’s invention and patented it in 1871. The original systems were based on telegraph wires and used specialized keyboards that converted stock data into Morse code that was then read by the machine on the other end.

The quotes were delivered by messengers, or "pad shovers," who ran a circuit between the trading floor and brokers' offices. The shorter the distance between the trading floor and the brokerage, the more up-to-date the quotes were.

Ticker-tape machines introduced in 1930 and 1964 were twice as fast as their predecessors, but they still had about a 15-to-20-minute delay between the time of a transaction and the time it was recorded. Mechanical ticker tapes gave way to electronic ones in the 1960s. In 1996, a real-time electronic ticker was launched.

The Bottom Line

Ticker tape was invented in the 19th century to relay information about stock trades on paper ribbons. The term is used in 2024 although ticker tape data is digitally displayed.