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First of all, let us discuss what exactly a stock ticker symbol is. A stock symbol is nothing but a combination of alphabets and numbers through which a company or a security can be identified on an exchange. This symbols exists for all bonds, options, futures in addition to all stocks. The stock tickers are the ones which are more often used than other types of symbols. For example, AT&T has the ticker T in New York Stock Exchange, Google has ticker GOOG in NASDAQ and Microsoft has ticker MSFT in NASDAQ.

The word stock ticker itself has a history of its own. This word started being used in last century when the buy and sell transactions used to happen in brokers' offices using noisy machines. These machines used to print the prices of the stock on a thin rolled paper. These machines used to make a typical noise when the prices were imprinted on the paper and this is where the word ticker evolved and since then is has become a common term in the financial world.

The length of the symbol can vary depending upon the exchange in which it is being traded. For example, the NYSE requires the symbol to be of one, two or three characters only while NASDAQ requires it to be of four or five characters. Most of the times, same stock is represented in a different way in different exchanges. For example, XOM.N tells us that this symbol is for NYSE exchange. Similarly, different exchanges have different suffixes.

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