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)
“A symbol is indeed the only possible expression of some invisible essence, a transparent lamp about a spiritual flame; while allegory is one of many possible representations of an embodied thing, or familiar principle, and belongs to fancy and not to imagination: the one is a revelation, the other an amusement.”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is connected with that of man.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)