Ticker Symbol
You may enter the ticker symbol in either lower-case or upper-case letters, and any lower-case letters automatically will be converted to upper case. If the characters you enter are not a valid ticker symbol or are not found in that server's database, the market price will be reported as zero.
The symbol that represents a company's stock on an exchange. A ticker symbol is a shorthand representation of a stock, Global Depository Receipt (GDR), fund, option, index, or other security which uniquely identifies that issue. Ticker symbols are used by quote servers for retrieving price quotes and other market-generated data. The current quote server database includes U.S. New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange and Nasdaq National Market System stocks.
For a security listed on the data server, the exact ticker symbol is needed. If you do not know the correct ticker symbol for a company, you may look it up using the company name. The name is the company's legal name as it appears on the latest quarterly or annual report. Each market data server has a symbol guide. You can check the symbol guide on your quote server in order to find rules for index symbols, futures, international stocks (GDRs), and any other symbol types supported by the server.
For a security not listed on the data server, you can use the default ticker symbol or enter a dummy ticker symbol and continue to the next page where you can enter a new ticker symbol and a new price. Non-listed securities include publicly-traded securities not included in the quote server database and non-publicly traded securities such as private letter stock, pre-IPO (initial public offering) stock, venture capital deals and private companies.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average includes 30 individual stocks. The ticker symbols of the 30 in July 1999 are ALD, AA, AXP, T, BA, CAT, CHV, KO, DIS, DD, EK, XON, GE, GM, GT, HWP, IBM, IP, JNJ, MCD, MRK, MMM, JPM, MO, PG, S, TAP, UK, UTX, and WMT.
Stocks, funds, ADRs, indexes, indicators, and money markets have ticker symbols. Some quote providers have proprietary symbols for their databases, and most quote providers have several but not all categories of quotes in their database. One common set of quote symbols includes the following:
| Dow Jones Industrial Average | $INDU | |
| S&P 500 Index | $SPX | |
| NASDAQ Composite | $COMPQ | |
| 5 Year U.S. T-Note interest rates | $FVX | |
| 10 Year U.S. T-Note interest rates | $TNX | |
| 30 Year U.S. T-Bond interest rates | $TYX | |
When entering a ticker symbol in some databases, you may need to enter market prefixes, followed by a colon, followed by the symbol. For U.S. markets, the market prefix may be optional.
To look up a ticker symbol, use the quote server with the database that provides the quotes. If there is no obvious symbol lookup feature with the quote server, then enter an invalid ticker symbol. This may take you to a ticker lookup service.