Electronic Ticker Tape
The stock market lends itself to the use of high-speed data-processing, even though a Wall Street man achieved notoriety some time back as the first embezzler to use computer techniques. Admittedly it is harder to track down the hand in the till when it pushes buttons and leaves no telltale fingerprints or handwriting, but computerization continues despite this possible drawback. The same firm has added digital computers to one of its offices for faster service. The American Stock Exchange installed $3 million worth of new processing equipment to provide instantaneous automatic reports on open, high, low, close, bid, asked, and volume-to-the-moment figures.
The stock market’s need for the computer lies in the usual two factors: tremendous paperwork and increasing pressure for speed. Trading of stock amounts to about three-fourths of a billion shares in a year, and occasionally 3 million shares a day change hands. A major brokerage house has confirmations to handle on thousands of trades, dividends to credit to nearly half a million active accounts, and security position and cash balances to compute for each customer. The increasing amount of business, plus the demand for more speed and accuracy, make the computer the only solution.
Simply reporting the results of the day’s marketing in the newspapers is a monumental task. The Associated Press is installing a system based on an IBM 1620 computer, in which ticker information will also be given in the computer for sorting, comparison, tabulation, and storage. At the correct time, the machine will print out the format for publication in the press at the rate of 4,500 words a minute. With a memory of 20 million characters and a capacity for 600,000 logical decisions each minute, the computer keeps up with stock information practically as fast as it is received, and even a late ticker will not mean a missed newspaper deadline. Associated Press expects to be able to transmit the stock-market results to its papers within fifteen seconds after the ticker closes. Not just in the United States but in Japan as well, the computer is invading the stock market. The abacus is out, and now the exchange in Tokyo is using an advanced UNIVAC solid-state computer to process transactions.