A ticker, synonym for a stock symbol, is the short form of full security (asset) name. A ticker has a stream of quotes (AKA prices) attached to it, continuously updated throughout a trading session by the various exchanges.
For example, take ETH-BTC
, if you have curl and jq installed, you can get a ticker from Kucoin with this command
curl -s https://api.kucoin.com/api/v1/market/orderbook/level1?symbol=ETH-BTC \| jq .data
The result will look like this :
{"time": 1597187421265,"sequence": "1594340550066","price": "0.033131","size": "0.0013217","bestBid": "0.03313","bestBidSize": "2.1812529","bestAsk": "0.033131","bestAskSize": "2.8001025"}
The first listed currency of a currency pair is called the base currency (ETH), and the second currency is called the quote currency. Price at 0.033131 means 1 Ether can be bought with 0.033131 Bitcoin.
These are the fields you can find on a ticker quote:
Field | Description |
| Currency pair |
| The opening price is the first trade price that was recorded during the day’s trading. |
| Last trade field is the price at which the last trade was executed. |
| The bid price shown represents the highest price. |
| The ask price shown represents the lowest price. |
| The day’s high price. |
| The day’s low price. |
| Volume-weighted average price (VWAP) is the ratio of the value traded to total volume traded over a particular time horizon (usually one day). |
| Volume is the number of shares or contracts traded. |
| Quote volume |
| The bid size represents the quantity of a security that investors are willing to purchase at a specified bid price. |
| The ask size represents the quantity of a security that investors are willing to sell at a specified selling price. |
| The moment at which the account information was retrieved. |