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I have downloaded a complete list of all NYSE stock symbols from the NASDAQ website here. As it turns out, many of these symbols are not recognized by the yahoo finance page. In particular, there are ticker symbols that use "^" and "/" (eg. VALE/A or CTZ^A) which yahoo finance does not recognize.

I've just noticed that, vice versa, yahoo itself has some conventions (eg. adding ".F" or ".SG" to the symbols) that don't appear on the NASDAQ list I downloaded. Why this incompatibility? Does anyone know how to "translate" the ticker symbols between the NASDAQ list and the yahoo finance webpage? I thought these symbols were supposed to be a sort of universal identifier.

Bob Baerker
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ben
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3 Answers3

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There isn't a single universal way to reference a stock, there are 4 major identifiers with many different flavours of exchange ticker (see xkcd:Standards)

  • Exchange Ticker, (i.e. What you got from NASDAQ) these are in different formats on each exchange. They are unique within the exchange but the same Ticker can be used on different exchanges maybe even within the same country (although this seems to be rare). Different finance companies (Yahoo, Google, Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters etc.) seem to use different variations of dots, dashes etc. to denote warrants, rights and different classes of shares.
  • SEDOLs (my favourite) this is as far as I can tell the only globally unique ID that will never cause you any problems since they identify a specific listed instrument on a specific exchange.
  • CUSIPs only unique with a country, only really used in US/Canada
  • ISINs like Cusips but with a country code so they can be used globally

I believe CUSIPs and ISINs represent a specific security rather than a specific listed instrument. This means you can have two listed instruments with one ISIN but different SEDOLs because they are listed in different places. The difference is subtle but causes problems with settlement

Specifically on your question (sorry I got sidetracked) take a look at CQS Symbol convention to see what everything means

David Hayes
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Nomenclature for stock symbols isn't standardized. Brokers and web sites use a variety of suffixes for non-standard symbols. This is particularly maddening for preferred stocks. Fortunately, securities have CUSIP numbers so that other than infrequent human error, ACAT transfers operate efficiently.

To demonstrate the insanity of web site nomenclature for preferred stocks, here's an example for an Alabama Power preferred stock:

 QuantumOnline     -       ALP-Q    
 S&P               -       ALP-Q    
 NYSE              PR      ALPPRQ   
 NYSE Amex         p       ALPpQ    
 Bloomberg        /P       ALP/PQ   
 Charles Schwab   /PR      ALP/PRQ    
 E-Trade           p       ALPpQ    
 Fidelity          PR      ALPPRQ   
 Google Finance    -       ALP-Q    
 IBKR              PR      ALP PRQ
 JPMorgan          PR      ALP PRQ  
 LPL Financial     '       ALP'Q        
 MarketWatch      .PR      ALP.PRQ  
 Quicken           PR      ALP PRQ  
 Sharadar         -P       ALP-PQ
 TD Ameritrade     -       ALP-Q    
 Vanguard         _p       ALP_pQ   
 Yahoo!           -p       ALP-pQ
Bob Baerker
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On NASDAQ the ^ is used to denote other securities and / to denote warrants for the underlying company. Yahoo maybe using some other designators for same.

Dheer
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