Stock exchange and market symbols

The stock ticker - what is it?

An exchange symbol or stock symbol (ticker) is a unique letter sequence, it is assigned to a security or currency for trading. In fact, it is a stenographic way of identification, so the number of letters in the ticker does not affect anything. It is a kind of abbreviation for identifying securities. Sometimes stock symbols include numbers in addition to letters. Each stock exchange has its own placement and formatting rules for symbols. In the U.S., tickers include 1-4 letters, which usually represent the name of a company. For example, Ford stock has a ticker symbol F. Symbols that are listed on Nasdaq consist of four or five letters. For example, Apple securities are designated as AAPL. Most European stock exchanges use the three-letter symbol. For example, the Dutch company Unilever is traded as UNA. In Asia, tickers use numbers. An example is HSBC Bank, which has the symbol 0005. Occasionally, the tickers change to reflect mergers. If one company used one ticker to trade, the symbol changes after the merger. Often tickers are reused. This practice is especially in demand in the United States, where the single-letter designation is considered a vanity symbol. For example, Visa Inc. uses the symbol V. It used to belong to "Vivendi".

Ticker Decoding

. What you need to know about stock symbols: - If a company has more than one class of exchange-traded securities, that class is added to the suffix. Preferred stock has a PR added to the ticker and a letter that denotes the class. - A number of designations can be used to figure out whether a stock has voting rights. This is especially true when there are several classes of securities traded on the market. For example, Alphabet Inc. (Google) has two classes of stock that trade on Nasdaq with the symbols GOOG and GOOGL. GOOG belongs to common shareholders, they do not have voting rights, as they belong to class C. GOOGL is class A and has voting rights. Each share has one vote. It's the same for Berkshire Hathaway. The company owns two classes of stock, A (BRK.A) and B (BRK.B). Class B securities have less voting power than Class A shares. - On the Nasdaq, some companies may have symbols that include fewer than 4 letters. For example, Facebook (FB) and Moneygram International (MGI). Tickers need to be studied carefully to avoid getting into trouble. In 2019, traders actively began to buy shares of Zoom Technologies, a little-known company from China. In a short period, the value of securities soared a thousand times. And all because investors mixed up the symbols. They thought they were buying shares of a large company from the U.S. Zoom Video Communications (its symbol ZM). And the ticker of the Chinese company was ZOOM. As a result, after the situation became clear, the quotes plummeted and many traders were left with nothing. In this section of the portal you can read about the symbols used on different exchanges at the moment.