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Financial Information Reporting in the Earliest Wall Street

Inside the Nasdaq Building in Times Square in New York is a broadcast studio whose curved wall is lined up with dozens of electronic screens, each of them displaying the ‘real time’ trading price of a major stock or commodity. The centre of the screen shows the most prominent information: the change in price and percentage. A price in green means upward movement and a price in red means downward. The less prominent information occupies the bottom of the screen: the trading price is on the left; the volume traded is on the right. The multiple illuminated screens in the studio confirm a belief that technology has always been at the forefront of the financial industry. The same belief was held by nineteenth-century stock brokers; at that time men in top hats gathered around a machine that made a ‘tick, tick, tick’ sound when it printed out stock prices on a long strip of paper unwound from a wheel inside the machine. The symbol and the price were simultaneously printed by two type wheels: one had the letters A-Z, another had the numbers 0-9 and the fractions of 1/8. An ink roller installed beneath the type wheels impressed on a narrow paper strip unwound from another roll (Prescott, 1892). A modern day trader may not find the machine useful, but she will have no problem with understanding what the letters and numbers mean. Similarly, a nineteenth-century stockbroker may not understand what the gleaming electronic boards are, but he may still be able to recognise some of the abbreviated symbols (such as WU for Western Union) and understand what the prices mean. The format of stock price display seems to be too stubborn to change, even though digital technology offers many possibilities to reformat the price display. The similar format of stock price display in the analogue and the digital