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How Are The Stock Exchange Symbols Are Chosen? Now, lets get into why exactly the stock exchange symbols have the amount of letters that they have, between one and five. Well, lets start with what happened with the first companies ever to receive stock ticker symbols. Of course, in the beginning all the letters were available, just like the shorter domain names were available when the internet first came out. So, because of this, the first companies to join the stock market were lucky enough to receive the tickers that were easiest to remember, the ones with only one or two letters. However, since there were only 26 letters in the alphabet (obviously), the one-letter tickers were awarded to only the companies that were most actively traded. At the time that this was happening, the only market available was the NYSE, which is another benefit of being one of the first to join since (as you may have known) the NYSE is the most prestigious of all the American exchanges. Another way that stock tickers are similar to domain names, is that companies can trade them amongst one another. However, with stock tickers (obviously) it is a much more high-stakes game. Finally, the simple stock exchange symbols evolved to something we know today as the... Dynamic Stock Ticker So, what we have today is what is known as the modern day dynamic stock ticker. These stock tickers (dynamic stock tickers) were invented in 1923 and consist of five different things. Here is an example of what you would see today as a stock ticker: DIS 2K @ 15.23 ^ 0.07 So, lets break it all down. The "DIS" is the stock, which we have covered so far. Next is the "2K". This is the number of shares traded in the most recent trade. In this case, two thousand. Then the "@" symbol, which simply means "at". "15.23" stands for the price at which the most recent trade took place at. From these simple numbers, you can tell how much money traded hands. You simply take the number of securities being traded (2k) and the price at which the securities were traded at and multiply them with each other. You get $30,460. So, this was a decent size trade. The "^" symbol simply states that this trade is "up" from the closing price from the previous day. Ezra Salken is the editor of http://www.successful-stock-trading.com/, the successful stock trading guide. For the top 7 things you should know before you start stock trading, check out http://www.successful-stock-trading.com/stock-market-for-beginners.html - Copyright: you may freely republish this article, provided the text, author credit, the active links and this copyright notice remain intact. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Ezra_Salken |