Charles Henry Dow, Edward Davis Jones, and Charles Milford Bergstresser in a small basement office at 15 Wall Street in New York (dowjones.
com). In May 1986, editor of the Wall Street Journal and founder of Dow Jones & Company, Charles Dow, first formulated and published the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) as an indicator of stock market performance (money-zine.com). When first published, the original components, or member companies, of the DJIA included "smokestack" companies across a range of industries. Of the original twelve companies that made up the Dow Jones Industrials back in 1896, General Electric is the only company still part of the Industrials. The other eleven companies included:1.
American Cotton Oil 2. American Sugar 3. American Tobacco - Broken up in 1911 by antitrust actions 4. Chicago Gas - Now part of Peoples Energy 5. Distilling & Cattle Feeding - Evolved into Millennium Chemicals 6. Laclede Gas - Still in operation as Laclede Group 7.
National Lead - Now known as NL Industries 8. North American - Utility broken up in the 1940s 9. Tennessee Coal, Iron, and Railroad Company - Bought by U.S. Steel 10.
US Leather - Dissolved in 1952 11. US Rubber - Now part of Michelin (money-zine.com)In 1897, the “Ticker” was announced in the February 26 issue of The Wall Street Journal (dowjones.com). A ticker symbol or stock symbol is a mnemonic used to differentiate publicly traded shares of corporation on a specific stock market.
A stock symbol may consist of letters, numbers or a combination of both (Wikipedia.com). The word “ticker” used to mean “ticker symbol” is exclusive for U.S. stock symbols.
Modern letter-only ticker symbols were developed by Standard & Poor’s (S&P) in order to bring a national standard to investing. Previously, a single company could have had numerous ticker symbols as they varied between the dozens of individual stock markets. The term “ticker” refers to the noise made by the ticker tape machines once widely used by stock exchanges.
