Do you know what a market ticker is? If you are interested in the stock market, possibly buying, selling and trading stocks, you should know what one is and how to read it.
Here is some information about what a market ticker is and what all of those symbols and numbers mean.
A market ticker, also called a stock ticker, includes information about what stocks are doing in the market.
The first piece of information on the ticker that you need to understand is the stock symbol.
This symbol tells you what company the rest of the information is about.
These symbols are usually three or four letters long.
Here are some examples of stock symbols and the companies that they designate.
AAPL is the symbol for Apple, AEP is the symbol for American Electric Power, F is the symbol for Ford and FITB is the symbol for Fifth Third Bank.
The next number is the stock number, often called volume.
This tells you how many shares have been traded over a set time period.
This is usually set for the current trading day or the last 24 hours.
There is also information about the last trade.
This is a price that shows what the last buy or sell amount was per share.
Right beside this is a percentage, which shows the percentage of change between the trade before the last trade and the last trade.
Some tickers also have an arrow showing if the stock is trading up or down.
In other words, if the arrow is pointing up the last trade was higher than the previous one.
There is usually a spread between what is being asked for a stock and what is being offered.
Some of the more advanced tickers show both of these numbers also.
If you are curious as to why this is called a ticker, the term comes from the early nineteen hundreds when there were machines that actually printed of information about stock trades on a narrow piece of paper.
When they were printing, they actually made a ticking noise.
So people started calling them tickers and the name has stuck even after the original ticking machines were no longer in use.
You can find market tickers for free online at most financial sites as well as at the big Internet portals like Yahoo.
Just look in the finances section.
If you are considering trying your hand in the stock market, it will be well worth your time to study a ticker and learn what all the things mean.