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Comment by HolyLampshade | Hacker News Reader

Little bit of a “the more you know” moment.

Historically NYSE (and AMEX; thought of in this specific context as CTA) had a lock on 1-3 character symbols. NASDAQ (via UTP) had a lock on 4-6 character symbols.

For a long time you could tell where something was listed purely by looking at the length of the symbol it traded under.

This all changed in the late 2000s or so, so no longer useful information.

I honestly would leave the industry if one of the exchanges tried to bend the industry to allow an emoji in a symbol. The communication protocols essentially lock this at 8 character alpha. It would be a huge pain in the ass, for everyone, to change this just because some exchange wants to appeal to a potential listing.

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NASDAQ at one point wanted to have "special characters" e.g. *()/ etc in ticker names too.

EVERYONE said it was a bad idea but they kept pushing it. Repeatedly.

Eventually, smarter heads prevailed and they got rid of the idea.

Yeah, they tried to carry the suffix symbology into the ticker itself, but that fortunately died not because of some great sanctity of the symbols but because someone thought it would confuse too much with how ACT and the CTCI protocol handled security categorization.

NYSE (really the access stack that both NYSE and AMEX ran on; the name escapes me since it died back in I think ‘08) has for a long time included a completely separate field in their protocols to indicate classification (preferred, warrants, classes, when issued, etc), but CTCI just jammed it into the symbol field.

Imagine how much stuff breaks if they allowed a comma.

Couple examples in my Twitter thread on FinTech outages that were basically that: https://x.com/alexpotato/status/1215876962809339904

Stock ticker: "BIGCO'; DROP TABLE TRANSACTIONS"

bobby tables goes to the stock market

> 8 character alpha

Good thing “xn--zp9h” fits, then.

Amusingly there is plenty of precedent (link below under Nasdaq Integrated Platform Suffix and the older ACT/CTCI suffixes) for using all of the wonderful character symbols to indicate different classes of securities.

Not as common, again, as it used to be...but still exists.

https://www.nasdaqtrader.com/trader.aspx?id=CQSsymbolconvent...

Nasdaq becomes more and more like a “normal” exchange every year. Historically, they’ve always just done their own thing for their own purpose, so it makes sense.

** for those that don’t know: NASDAQ stands for “National Association of Security Dealers - Automated Quotation (service)”. It was forced into existence by the SEC. Prior to that there was only the NASD, who traded blocks of shares amongst themselves so that each individual security dealer could meet the needs of their customers. As the trading amongst themselves grew larger and larger, the SEC added progressively more regulation until finally the had to build the NASDAQ computer system, which nobody would even recognize today.

So again, they were always separate from everything else and did things that made sense according to their own needs. They were very different until they were no longer allowed to be different.

Don’t disagree there, though this has been status quo for nearly two decades now.

By that measure regional exchanges were their own beasts for a long time. The environment has definitely streamlined a ton since RegNMS was implemented and the exchanges consolidated a bit.

Even the technology stacks the current markets run are basically identical within three families of design (even the upstart markets, and even those that are not directly licensing technology from ICE, Nasdaq, or Cboe). Differentiation just doesn’t pay like it used to.

Agreed. Even LTSE is just running the MEMX stack.

Shit, MIAX is just the old BATS/Cboe technology with some local flair. There are multiple derivatives of the old Island/INET tech stack, mainly in ATSs, but the iteration Nasdaq is operating on only diverges where extreme message volume factors in.

No one is silly enough to want the abomination of design that is Pillar, but the point still stands that technical differentiation isn’t really important in the way it was 15-20yr ago.

Pillar is truly awful.

Anything but ISINs, I guess...

I tried for a while to push internally and amongst a few of the markets to move to ISIN, Currency, MIC but yeah…anything but that.

Honestly the problem is the ticker is too valuable advertising for the listed company, and since listings are not governed by a central regulator in the same way they are in Europe, for example, there’s always going to be this sort of friction about who is willing to bend the most to win the business.

I think ISINs being used in Europe might even predate the EU taking charge of a lot of financial market regulation.

Probably they became more popular/important specifically because tickers did not, which in turn is probably because there are so many countries/exchanges that a global exchange-driven namespace was never really feasible?

Well, listings had domestic regulator control for the most part but I think you hit it on the head. Brokers in Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt, or Milan needed to access 15-20 countries worth of exchanges, and the curse in the EU is the multi-currency cross listings.

Easier, if somewhat more verbose, to use the three in combo to identify. Helped somewhat by the message volumes being a small fraction of what they are in the US. Less need to optimize on a per order, or per market data packet basis.

Also explains why FIX is more prevalent in EU markets than it is in the US.

It doesn't. Only 5 of those characters are in the alphabet.

"we're developing software to trade thousandth of cents every nanosecond, so time sensitive we're paying to get our servers physically closer to the exchange one" but supporting unicode in display strings ? Absolutely and terminally impossible. lmao

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