Tape Is Late
Categories: Trading
You knew a dude in college everyone called "Tape." Guy always kept people waiting. It led to the inside joke catch phrase: "Tape is late."
This definition isn't about that guy (nor his girlfriend, who had the same nickname, but when you heard that she was late, it was a completely different situation). Thie one's about stock trading.
Usually, the stock market kind of plugs along. Buying and selling happens, but not so much that things get excited...just a bunch of people going about their normal workdays. But then, sometimes, things get frothy. Volume spikes. People are buying and selling like crazy, sweating through their suits, holding two phones up to their heads, shouting instructions until they go hoarse.
One of the consequences of these high-volume situations is that the ticker quotes can start to lag. They fall behind the price action as it happens in real time. At that point, one of the things the sweaty traders might hoarsely yell into their two phones: "Tape is late! Tape is late!" Tape here being a reference to the old-fashioned ticker tape used on those antiquated stock ticker machines. They don't actually use those on Wall Street anymore, but the name stuck. So...when the tape is late, the quotes aren't keeping up with the action.
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Finance: What is Ticker Tape?2 Views
Finance allah shmoop what is ticker tape It's this tick
tick tick you know without the explosion at the end
Okay wavy line time travel dissolve thing Go ahead Back
to nineteen twenty seven Stock information like stock prices used
to be passed along via telegraph machine This thing little
magnets were engaged electronically and the stock prices were printed
on thin paper tape known as ticker tape Yes clever
name However typically only the last numbers would be printed
Like if you had ibm training in one hundred seventy
three dollars Four cents All you would see is that
three Fifty for there on the end Well why would
this happen Well because under this technology the ink and
paper cost off fortune and because there was so much
information to convey well had they spelled out the entire
name of the company rather than the ticker symbol alone
And yes that's how the symbols all came to be
While then that printing would have taken forever just to
send over say an hour's worth of trades And by
the time the prince got done while the trades would
be irrelevant So recycling with all this take laying around
was kind of a thing back then As well And
old ticker tape was used for two things Parades and
well for leper con toilet paper But we don't talk
much about that anyway but more for parade People used
to throw the stuff out of building windows As you
know floats in astronauts and presidents went by Well by
the nineteen sixties the traditional ticker tape parade was no
longer needed There were better and faster ways Teo you
know throw paper and to transmit stock price info Well
today everything's done electronically Thank you The internet No more
dead trees Thank you very much So ticker tape refers
to the stream of stock prices and information that come
through a usually on a mobile device or screen of
some sort today Anyway that's progress worthy of a parade