BUSINESS NEWS

TUPNews recently lunched with the carbon boys at Barclays Capital in Canary Wharf, in-house mind. Not many banks do the in-house catering any more. The French banks tend to do it best, but the Barcap boys excelled themselves here.

More to the point, TUPNews noticed that a massive ticker has been slapped on the side of one of the Canary Wharf buildings – above the Corney & Barrow as you turn right out of the space-age tube station. It’s yellow on black, curves around the building and was running stock prices from the FTSE 100.

Tickers are fantastic. TUPNews recently visited Times Square in New York City, where there are tickers galore. Reuters, Bloomberg et al running news headlines, share prices, sports scores – all different colours and sizes. It’s particularly cool when two tickers stacked on top of each other run at different speeds – Bloomberg TV has this, for example. TUPNews feels a deep sense of serenity when watching these tickers, and I hope that Canary Wharf ends up covered in them.

The best thing about side-of-a-building tickers is that they are completely pointless. The chances of an outdoor ticker delivering critical information at a critical time are virtually nil – if it’s really important for you to keep track of real-time stock prices, you’re probably sitting on a trading floor rather than standing outside watching a ticker on the side of a building.

I can’t prove this, but I suspect that outdoor tickers are the finance community’s way of tacitly recognising that what they do has some aesthetic value, that it is sometimes strangely beautiful.