It sounds like a vision of the future of stock trading, where blockchains have taken over the equity markets, and where we use cryptocurrencies to buy hard-coded stocks, while spending most of our time in VR simulators shooting at aliens and dancing the floss with avatars that look like Spider-Man wearing medieval armor and a fox's tail.
But, sadly, the term "hard-coded stock" is much more pedestrian. It's just the name for plain old stock tickers. Like...Microsoft has the ticker MSFT, and Apple has APPL.
These three-and-four-letter signifiers ease the process of stock trading. They're like nicknames, but each one is unique to a particular company. That way, you don't try to buy the iPhone maker Apple and end up buying a company that owns a bunch of orchards in California.
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Finance: What is a CUSIP Number?119 Views
Finance, a la shmoop. What is a CUSIP number? Close that's a Cusack number
867-53-09, yeah we know there. So yeah you know when you go to the grocery
store and the cashier swipes your apples eight times across that little bar code [Apple being scanned]
reader thingy and it doesn't work again and again and again and then she finally [Error coming up on the screen]
pulls back the plastic from where the Apple was tagged hunts for her glasses [Cashier putting on her glasses]
and then visually finds the number associated with that Apple and then just
manually types it in. Well that's the fruit equivalent of a CUSIP number [Guy talking in a supermarket]
A CUSIP number is well just that only applied to securities, stocks, bonds even
muni bonds. CUSIP stands for committee on uniforms security identification [The meaning of each letter is shown]
procedures, and is basically just the serial number system of securities, but [CUSIP definition written on a 100 dollar bill]
has nine digits, the first six represent the original issuer of the security like
coca-cola shares when it went public a gazillion years ago. Then the next two [The fix 6 digits are highlighted]
characters refer to that type of security at hand like is it a basic
equity bond, muni bond and the ninth digit is riboflavin yeah it's just there
to be sure the other digits are all accurate and assures that there's no [The 3 digits meaning are shown]
replication in any of the other CUSIP index number sets. So yeah CUSIP numbers
make the securities easier to track because it's awfully hard to get a
microchip into one of them. [Microchip pulled out of a bond certificate]
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You've seen routing numbers on checks before, but what do they actually do? Hit play to find out.