Another interesting detail regarding the tickers is that while the Stock Exchange collects the quotations and puts them out on the tickers, it assumes no re sponsibility for them. They are neither official nor guaranteed. If they were "official," the officers of the Stock Exchange would hardly have a moment free from testifying in court in disputes over stock deals.
6. News similar to stock quo tation tickers are the news tickers which are owned and controlled entirely by different private companies. As the title indicates, news is the primary considera tion with these tickers. Declaration of dividends, amalgamations, and mergers, election of directors and officers, financial conditions, internal and external, and a myriad other facts are disseminated by this system. The news tickers are located inmost of the larger cities including New York, Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Cleve land, Washington and Buffalo. The paper used in them is for obvious reasons considerably wider than that used in the stock ticker, so that the news ticker is known as the "broad" or "page" ticker. Its work is rapid and accurate and it is a practically indispensable instrument to brokers and speculators, for not only must current prices be known, but the circumstances which exert a powerful influence on the movement of prices must be taken into account.
7. Bulletin less rapid is the dis semination of news by means of the bulletin service. Only a limited number of cities have this facility. In New York City there are two, Boston has two and Philadelphia, one. About every half hour during the period of business activity, from 9 a. m. to 3 p. m. these bulletins come out with extensive information on the many subjects treated.
Page tickers, bulletins, and certain evening and morning financial newspapers are all published by the same companies known as "news bureaus." Thus the same news is used in all three forms of publication, appearing as a mere flash of the essential facts on the ticker, in fuller detail in the bulletins and naturally most complete of all, in the papers.
These reporting companies operate with great ra pidity thru the employment of many reporters on a single detail. If directors of a certain railroad com pany are to meet at noon to declare an important dividend, the financial news bureaus will detail sev eral men to the job. One man stands outside the
meeting room, another at the end of the hall and an other at the nearest available telephone. Days be forehand arrangements are made to obtain the use of a telephone close to the directors' meeting room and this is held open to the news bureau's office from per haps ten or eleven o'clock on. By this practice and by the use of relays of men it is possible to get out on the tickers the news of some event or action within sLxty,seconds of its actual announcement.
It is difficult to conceive of the consummate per fection reached by the news service of Wall Street. On a certain day of each month on the dot of noon, Western Union time, a clerk in the offices of the United States Steel Corporation hands to reporters on the other side of a railing a statement of the amount of the company's unfilled orders. When this is done the news tickers which stand in the offices of hun dreds of bankers and brokers thruout New York City print the figures anywhere from one to two min utes after twelve. The directors of the Standard Oil Company of California met one day in San Francisco and declared a dividend. Their action was wired to New York by the San Francisco representative of a Wall Street news agency and wired back to a broker's office in San Francisco within fifteen minutes.
8. Newspapers.—Naturally the cheapest and most widely used sources of Wall Street information are the financial pages of the daily newspapers. Much of the financial news that appears therein is adapted from the news bureaus, while on the other hand the agencies get many of their suggestions from the gen eral daily press. In the same way the morning and evening papers get many suggestions from each other. Each paper has its own clientele and its own method of treating the news.
This is not the place to describe in detail all the papers which give news of interest to persons who trade in stocks or commodities. In New York, in ad dition to the extensive departments in the general press, there are four dailies which contain little else; the Wall Street Journal, Financial America, Journal of Commerce, and the Commercial. There are also numerous weekly and monthly publications as well as the so-called "manuals," containing information about the leading corporations, and many "services" and card systems along the same lines.