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:
“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose.”
—Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930)
“Every natural fact is a symbol of some spiritual fact. Every appearance in nature corresponds to some state of the mind, and that state of the mind can only be described by presenting that natural appearance as its picture.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.”
—Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)