Stock market ticker simply refers to a series of letters and/or numbers identifying a particular stock on a particular exchange.

Stock tickers are the most familiar types of ticker; other tickers might be options tickers, future contracts tickers etc. If we look at the financial section of a newspaper, we can see lots of short letter codes. Those are stock market tickers, and each stands for a company. It can also be seen on business programs or financial news networks or many online websites. It can be seen as flashing series of baffling letters, arrows and numbers scrolling along the bottom of TV screen.

Stock market tickers are used instead of long company name to facilitate for placing orders with brokers and looking up information on particular company.

A few examples of stock tickers include:

AT&T (T) has only one letter ticker while Bank of America (BAC) has three and Microsoft (MSFT) has four letter tickers. Exchange has their own methods for providing tickers.Certain exchanges allow companies to be listed under only one letter, while other exchanges allow companies to be listed with four letters. How many characters a company’s ticker has, and whether its ticker consists of numbers, letters or other symbols depend on the exchange where that company’s stock is traded.

Reading the Ticker

Here’s an example of a quote shown on a typical ticker tape:

On many tickers, colors are also used to indicate how the stock is trading. Here is the color scheme most TV networks use:

In the trading period and after trading closed, stock market tickers with the concerned colors are continually scroll across the screen of financial channels, website, displaying current, or slightly delayed, data.

One can constantly track or stay informed about the stock market by regularly watching the stock market tickers on any media.