Thursday, February 27, 2014

Definition Of A Stock Symbol

Inventory represents collection ownership that investors pay for and sell to capitalize on changes in its value. In the U.S., this trading takes put on civic exchanges --- Late York Inventory Change (NYSE) and Governmental Partnership of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations Operation (NASDAQ) --- and seven district exchanges, including Boston and Calming. The inventory of some American firms as well trades on international markets in Europe and Asia. Everyone marketplace requires their listed companies To possess a exclusive individuality, or inventory symbol, for easily done recognition.


History


Inventory symbols, further manifest as ticker or trading symbols, period back to the 1800s when brokers and traders received inventory payment updates via ticker tape machines that used telegraph wires. Initially, companies had multiple symbols for the altered exchanges in career at that chronology. Morals & Wick's developed "a public criterion" using letters that saved bandwidth and avoided confusion, according to the NYSE.


Obtaining a Symbol


Companies keep the possibility of selecting the "ticker moniker" under which they Testament be traded or accepting one assigned by the interchange. Prior to approval, the replace verifies that no other society uses that inventory symbol. As a self-regulatory assembling, the alter uses the Intermarket Symbol Reservation Authority Plan's Symbol Reservation System to reserve the symbols. This process, states the NYSE, follows a "a first-come, first-serve" criteria. NYSE adds that no standardization exists for preferred stock symbols.


Symbol Selection


The AllAboutStockMarket site notes that companies often base their symbol on the first letters of their name. If that symbol has been assigned, the firm may resort to a moniker that represents a key product or aspect of its business. For instance, an airline selected a symbol related to its headquarters' airport, while a musical instrument manufacturer chose Beethoven's initials. The NYSE notes that "numerical or alphanumerical" stock symbols clarify company identification in Asian markets. USA Today reports that NASDAQ received approval in February of that year "to handle stock symbols of four or fewer letters." Then a Securities and Exchange Commission ruling in July 2007 allowed companies to keep their symbols when moving from the NYSE to NASDAQ. That ruling now includes two-letter, or "English character" symbols, according to the NYSE.

Interpretation

The language of stock symbols includes "appended codes" to notify investors about company financial performance notes the site Spiritus-Temposis.



The investor pages of a company's website will display its stock symbol.

Market ID

At one time U.S. stock symbols clued investors on where a stock traded: those with one, two or three letters traded on the NYSE; those with four traded on the NASDAQ. That distinction changed in 2007.



The SEC reports that a symbol will carry the end-letter "Q" when a company enters bankruptcy proceedings. The letter "D" added to the end of a symbol indicates the stock is new, an "X" stands for mutual fund and "E" means the firm is delinquent with its SEC filing.