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

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Finance allah shmoop what is ticker tape It's this tick

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tick tick you know without the explosion at the end

00:12

Okay wavy line time travel dissolve thing Go ahead Back

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to nineteen twenty seven Stock information like stock prices used

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to be passed along via telegraph machine This thing little

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magnets were engaged electronically and the stock prices were printed

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on thin paper tape known as ticker tape Yes clever

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name However typically only the last numbers would be printed

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Like if you had ibm training in one hundred seventy

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three dollars Four cents All you would see is that

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three Fifty for there on the end Well why would

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this happen Well because under this technology the ink and

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paper cost off fortune and because there was so much

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information to convey well had they spelled out the entire

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name of the company rather than the ticker symbol alone

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And yes that's how the symbols all came to be

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While then that printing would have taken forever just to

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send over say an hour's worth of trades And by

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the time the prince got done while the trades would

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be irrelevant So recycling with all this take laying around

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was kind of a thing back then As well And

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old ticker tape was used for two things Parades and

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well for leper con toilet paper But we don't talk

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much about that anyway but more for parade People used

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to throw the stuff out of building windows As you

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know floats in astronauts and presidents went by Well by

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the nineteen sixties the traditional ticker tape parade was no

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longer needed There were better and faster ways Teo you

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know throw paper and to transmit stock price info Well

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today everything's done electronically Thank you The internet No more

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dead trees Thank you very much So ticker tape refers

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to the stream of stock prices and information that come

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through a usually on a mobile device or screen of

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some sort today Anyway that's progress worthy of a parade

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