- This is my original piece of ticker tape, given to me by Mr. Ramsay. I put a ruler on it, and it is exactly 1 inch wide. I have about 10 feet of tape. I put an image of part of this tape over the top right corner of the cover of a book I published in 2000.
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- I was amazed to find that this piece of tape being sold on eBay was dated only one day after my piece of tape. From the more than 15,000 possible dates (and many more if you go earlier), it seemed very unlikely that this tape would differ from mine by only one day. After exchanging emails with the vendor, we decided that he likely got his tape from the same gentleman that I got my tape from, some 15 or so years earlier. I think I recall that Mr. Ramsay told me that he had two reels of ticker tape in his basement. He likely saved reels from two successive days. Perhaps he pulled them from the accumulated trash on the same day. Perhaps he did that when the broker he was working for was stopping using physical tape and was switching to electronic reporting. I figure one reel eventually went to this vendor, while part of the other came to me.
- I once did a back-of-the-envelope calculation that at least 100 million miles of ticker tape was produced. The fact that my tape and this tape, although examined 15-20 years after they were each obtained, both came from the same source, reinforces the fact that although 100 million miles of the stuff was produced, stock ticker tape is actually very rare nowadays! It was all thrown, or thrown out.
- For the largest image, (the one with the green background), I did not immediately know that it was the same date as the other two. So, I set about dating it. Note, however, that the handle is missing from some of the stock prices. That is, the leading digit(s) has(have) been dropped from some stock prices. For example, IBM says "7 7/8" but was actually trading at 317 7/8. The vendor told me that "During busy times, the ticker tape would occasionally drop the volume figures and everything but the last dollar digit. The machines could only print so many characters per minute, so this was a way to keep the ticker running in real time. Tape delays made people nervous." Elsewhere I read that if the tape delay was more than one minute, the handles would be dropped, and volume information might be dropped also, unless the volume was 5,000 shares or more. He sent me a link to the last image in this group (tape-delay machine). The missing handle(s) made the matching process a bit more complicated, because I had to write code that allowed for multiple possible unknown handles. So, I had to write code that would look for the full price on the day in the database or the full price with the first digit shaved off, or the full price with two digits shaved off. My code still returned the same unique date.
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- This tape was originally advertised on eBay as being from 1972. The vendor was surprised when I pinpointed it to May 18, 1973. I was surprised by the late date on this tape. I did not realize that the tickers were still running in 1973.
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- If the last date surprised me, then this date amazed me: April 9, 1975. One vendor (not the one for this tape) told me that "The first fully electronic machines, that could outpace the paper tape, came out in 1960, and started getting a big share of the market by 1964. The paper tape machines probably ended production around 1966/1967, but were not retired. They ran side-by-side with the new machines in larger firms. Certainly they were too outdated by 1982 to keep up, but [I am] not sure when the last one ran. I seem to recall a roll dated 1976, but [that is] not definite." He also gave me the following quote from 1971 "paper ticker tape is so rare these days that New York City has had to ask brokers with such tickers to hoard the tape so that there will be enough on hand to make a decent showing when a Broadway parade is held."
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- Well, I thought this was impossible. This piece and the next come from the 1990s. I found the following image at Getty's Web site. It is their property, but they have it mislabeled at their site as being from the 1970s. Note that this tape lists ticker symbols in alphabetical order, and without volumes, rather than in trading time order. Sure enough, after double checking, I can confirm that these are all closing prices on May 23, 1991.
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- I found the following piece for sale on Ebay. The vendor said it came from an estate sale in Chicago.
At first, I thought it was some sort of fabrication/fake. I contacted someone in the U.S. who suggested that
it is not a fabrication of any sort, but rather that in discount broker offices in the 1990s, the brokers would
sometimes use an old ticker machine that had previously been retired. Perhaps the machine was not well maintained,
which explains the "sloppy printing, cheap ink, and a residual line produced from a dirty (inky) pressure roller."
The paper also appears to be quite roughly cut.
Note that the ink used here is not Western Union's old
#56 Purple, Ticker Ink
of the older tape above.
My contact suggested that this ticker machine would have been in the broker's front office because some, perhaps older, customers expected to see a ticker machine in a brokerage office. Also, it added a little noise to the office which gave an air of busy-ness. Also, some of the older brokers had lived with ticker machines all their lives, and did not want to give them up. Note that the following day, Friday April 1, 1994, was an exchange holiday for Good Friday. I suggested to the vendor that someone knew they were going to have a long weekend, they felt relaxed about it, and they grabbed the tape to take home for their kids to play with, or just for fun, or something like that.
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- A contact sent me the following image, below left. He thinks it came from an eBay auction in 2002. The prices are in decimals, for the first time. At first I thought they were prices on 16ths, 32nds, 64ths, etc., and only rounded to two decimals, but no, these stocks stopped trading on 1/8ths etc. about five months before this date, on January 29, 2001 (see this LA Times Article).
- I checked every date from January 2, 1930 to Dec 29, 2017, and there is only one date that matches the prices on this decimal ticker tape. Nothing else comes close to matching. It is Wed June 13, 2001. In addition to the prices on the tape matching only that day, the price changes, for example, AOL 52.56+0.46 match exactly the closing prices from the previous day, Tuesday June 12, 2001. That is, for each of the five price stamps, if I take the + numbers and add them to the closing prices from the previous day, I get the price stamp on the tape. However, these price stamps are definitely not the closing prices on June 13th. So, they must be prices sampled strictly within the trading day, with a price change to indicate the change from the previous day's close at that point during the day. I have not seen ticker tape before where the individual stock price is given along with the change from the previous day's close. Two other odd things about the tape are that it does not have volume and my eye tells me it is 0.75 inches wide, and not the old 1 inch wide tape.
- AOL is America Online, SNE is Sony Corp, RSH is Radio Shack, GMH is GM, GLW is Corning Glass.
- My contact told me that in 2001 there was a company making replica universal tickers that printed real-time quotes when hooked to a computer (see www.stocktickercompany.com). He said that this would also explain the thinner tape, as one inch tape is "too fat" for a universal ticker to operate smoothly. He said that the replica couldn't print fast enough to track the entire market. So, you created your own list of stocks to track, and it limited itself to those companies. He said that they sold a dozen or more machines in the first few years to brokerage firms and museums. They also sold custom ticker tape printed with whatever you wanted. I contacted The Stock Ticker Company in June 2018 and they replied to confirm that they were the only folks with working stock tickers in 2001, and so it looks like it was produced on one of their machines. I also included below right an image from their Web site showing tape coming out of one of their machines. As of July 2018, they advertise a very handsome working Universal Stock ticker replica for $22,995 and rolls of 0.75 inch wide ticker tape for sale for $99.95 per roll.
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- I saw the following item for sale on eBay during 2018. Although it purports to be genuine ticker tape, the quotes are in decimals, which places it after January 2001, which seems unlikely unless it is a fabrication or a replica. The first entry looks like it says March 10, 2005, which is consistent with decimal pricing, but there is no date any time between 1930 and 2017 inclusive with recorded NYSE prices on these stocks that line up with the stamps on the tape.
- I can match three of the five prices on September 1, 1998 (HD, KRB, ACF) and another three on March 25, 2004 (HD, KRB, LU), and there are 25 days where I can match two of the prices, including two days in March 2005 (KRB, ACF), but on March 10th, 2005, only one price matches (ACF). The closest days bracketing March 2005 that match the price on MRK are February 23, 2004 and June 21, 2007. So, I think this is a modern creation, perhaps printed on an old ticker machine, but perhaps just printed on a laser printer using a scan of some 1990s tape and PhotoShop.
- I wondered if March 10, 2005 was the date someone retired, and if these are the prices at which the retiree liquidated a large portfolio, perhaps at some time around that date, plus or minus a year or two, but not all on the same day. Alternatively, it might be set in a lucite block to commemorate some merger or acquisition deal. I noticed, for example, that KRB stopped trading on December 30, 2005.
- A contact suggested it might have been printed using a replica from The Stock Ticker Company, but I think that seems unlikely in this case (because the tape appears to be 1 inch wide, not 0.75 inches wide, because the prices don't match any genuine day, and because the print quality is so poor---all in contrast to the June 13, 2001 example above).
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