Tick Test Rules

1) Remove the tick...making sure the head doesn’t come off in your skin.

2) Preserve the tick in a sterile container until you get to the nearest lab.

3) Start a prophylactic course of antibiotics, just in case.

Also, the term refers to a set of rules related to when you can make certain trades on Wall Street. The ticks in question represents near-term stock price changes. A tick up represents an increase in the most recent price change; a tick down refers to a decline.

The most famous tick test rule prevented traders from shorting a stock on a downtick.

A short represents a bet that the price of a stock will decline. Regulators worried that short sellers would pile onto vulnerable stocks...sorta like pushing down the head of someone drowning in a pool. So they put in place the downtick rule, which said that a short could only be put into effect after the stock had ticked up. Basically, the person had to poke their head above water before you could push it back down.

The rule was eventually eliminated. Regulators basically decided that "drowning fools are going to drown anyway."