U.S. Stock Symbol History
In the United States, modern letter-only ticker symbols were developed by Standard & Poor's (S&P) to bring a national standard to investing. Previously, a single company could have many different ticker symbols as they varied between the dozens of individual stock markets. The term ticker refers to the noise made by the ticker tape machines once widely used by stock exchanges.
The S&P system was later standardized by the securities industry and modified as years passed. Stock symbols for preferred stock have not been standardized.
Read more about this topic: Ticker Symbol
Famous quotes containing the words stock, symbol and/or history:
“The freedom to make a fortune on the Stock Exchange has been made to sound more alluring than freedom of speech.”
—John Mortimer (b. 1923)
“Whatever we inherit from the fortunate
We have taken from the defeated
What they had to leave us—a symbol:
A symbol perfected in death.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)