Stock Market For Beginners » stock market ticker

Stock Ticker Symbols – How to read a stock ticker?

admin — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 03:30:33 +0000

A stock ticker symbol gives out a lot of information about the company in just a few letters. For a beginner or an experienced investor, it is very important to be able to understand and read stock tickers quickly. The ticker tells you the name of the company, which exchange the stock is being traded, is the company filing for bankruptcy and lot more. But, looking at a stock symbol or a stock ticker, you would be wondering you to decipher these things from a few characters. Let us try to explain the stock ticker in plain English.

What is a stock ticker?

A ticker is a combination of alphabets or numbers which identify a particular security on a particular exchange. There are tickers available for stocks bonds, options, futures etc but stock tickers are the ones which are most commonly used.

The origin of the word ‘ticker’ has an interesting story. The word evolved in the beginning of last century when the news of buy and sell transactions used to get delivered to brokers’ offices by noisy machines that essentially stamped share price data onto thin strips of rolled paper. These noisy machines made a very distinct ticking noise during their busiest periods, which is how tickers eventually earned their name.

A few examples of tickers are:

AT&T has the ticker T in New York Stock Exchange

Microsoft has ticker MSFT in NASDAQ

Google has ticker GOOG in NASDAQ

EXXON Mobil Corporation has ticker XOM at New York Stock Exchange

As you can notice, the number of characters in the ticker is varying. This is because each exchange has certain guidelines around the number of characters which should be present in the stock ticker. New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) mandates that stock ticker should have ticker of 1, 2 or 3 characters only while NASDAQ needs it for 4 or 5 characters.

The stock tickers are represented in different ways at different exchanges. For example, ticker of Exxon Mobil listed in NYSE can be represented as XOM.N. A ticker in London stock exchange will have .L as suffix of the stock ticker. Similarly, in Mexico exchange, it has .MX as suffix. For a company listed in various exchanges (like international companies), the characters of the company stock ticker will be different at different exchanges. For example Rio Tinto has different tickers in NYSE (RTP) and over the counter markets (OTC: RTPPF).

It is also not important to have companies name of initials in the stock ticker. Many times the initials are not available since they have been taken by other companies. Therefore, companies have innovative tickers which creative and represent what they do. For example tickers for Avis Budget group have ticket CAR, Harley Davidson has HOG, Sun Microsystems has JAVA, and Boston Beer Company has SAM etc.

While a ticker symbol can inform you of where a stock trades, it can also tell you whether a company is delinquent in its regulatory filings or is undergoing bankruptcy proceedings, among other details. Therefore, understanding the stock ticker symbols is very useful for those interesting in learning about stock market.

Free real time stock quotes

admin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 03:38:37 +0000

Getting free real time stock quotes for the investors was not possible till sometime back. The investors had to pay some kind of subscription fee to the websites which provided this service to them. Usually, this fee was a monthly fee therefore the investors had to pay it each month even though they were not trading that time. But, things are changing and now it is possible to get free real time stock quotes.

The first and the easiest way to get free real time stock quotes is your brokerage trading account. The online trading account has an in built feature which lets the investors see the real time quotes of any stock from any of the three major exchanges which are New York Stock exchange (NYSE), National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) and the American Stock Exchange (AMEX). But, people who don’t have any online trading account don’t have this facility.

For these people, newer avenues have started opening up. One of them is the Google Finance website. You just have to logon to your account and you would be able to see online and real time stock quotes absolutely free. This feature has been very recently made available for all users of Google account.

In a very new development, some cellphone carriers have started a facility in which they will provide you with free real time stocks quotes. This facility comes as a part of your monthly subscription of cellphone therefore you don’t have to pay anything extra for using this service. You should check with your cellphone carrier to see if they have started this service yet or not.

There are some free stock tickers also available which you can use to get online real time quotes without any fees. You can download one of these tickers and install on your desktop. You will have some options in which you can choose the stocks which you want to see, current price, opening price and closing price. Before installing such a stock ticker, make sure that it is free of any spyware and adware otherwise you will be at a risk of losing your personal information from your computer.

The real time stock quotes are very important of any investor. These are even more important for active traders since they always have to be up to date with the latest stock prices. As you see, there are various options available for free now so that you don’t have to pay the subscription fees to get the real time stock quotes. While the paid services have more information and news, these free alternatives are also worth a look.

Real time stock quotes – how to get them?

admin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 03:34:04 +0000

It is very important for investors to get real time stock quotes if they are involved in online trading. These real time quotes are even more important for active traders since they look for small changes and decide on buying or selling stocks online very quickly. Usually, you can get real time stock quotes for free if you have an online brokerage trading account. This feature is already available for all online trading customers.

You should know that there are two types of quotes – real time quotes and streaming quotes. The streaming quotes are those which you usually see on TV channels and most financial websites. These streaming quotes are generally delayed by around 15 to 20 minutes from real time. Therefore, these are not accurate since the price of stock could have changed a lot in this period. The investors cannot rely on these quotes to make buy or sell decisions.

The other type of quotes is called real time stock quotes. As the name suggests, these are real time quotes giving the true price of the stocks at that particular time. This stock quote is very important to the active traders. There are various ways through which you can get real time stock quotes. There are many websites like Yahoo Finance, CNN Money and Google Finance which provide this information.

These websites have loads of information apart from the real time stock quotes which help investors remain up to date with market news and events. This information also helps the investors to make informed decisions. Most of the websites which offer free online quotes may have some delayed data. Most websites which give real time quotes need you to subscribe to their website by giving some fee. You should be careful while deciding which website subscription you choose. Some websites also provide free trail period as well. If you are going to just use the trial period, make sure that you cancel the subscription before the trial period ends else you will be charged the subscription fee without any notification.

Another factor which should be considered while choosing real time quotes is that you should get quotes from all 3 major exchanges namely New York Stock exchange (NYSE), National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations (NASDAQ) and the American Stock Exchange (AMEX). Some of the real stock quote providers require you to download an executable program and install it on your computer. While this makes the interface easy to use, you should make sure that it is free from any kind of virus. It is always better to subscribe to a reputed website which has a credible history.

Stock Market Ticker for Beginners as a Tool to learn stock market

admin — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 04:31:44 +0000

Stock market ticker is a tool that as a stock market for beginners instrument you need to use for effective managing of your portfolio.

There are several online brokerage firms and companies that will provide you the stock market ticker once you open an account with them. These brokerage firms have a downloadable version which will you can install on your desktop.

The stock market ticker can also be seen in action on several news sites such as cnbc and yahoo finance.

Reading the stock market ticker is easy as lists the important stocks by default or you customize it with the stocks you are interested in. It tells you what was the last executed trade price for those stock as well it tell you how much the stock has gone up or down from the last traded stock price of yesterday.

It also tells what the volume of the stock traded is.

Stock market ticker can be of use to you since you can then take a decision seeing the stock market price that whether you need to buy or sell a particular stock. The stock ticker provides an ideal on your hands information about stocks which otherwise you will have to call the stock broker to get an answer on.

People who are learning to invest in stocks would need to understand the importance of the stock market charts and stock market tickers. These tools give you the kind of information needed for intelligent stock picking as well as provides kind stock market at your finger tips.