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I have been looking into xtb/xstation for trading stocks, and when you look there you will find e.g. a symbol SOF.BE which is a stock from some company "Sofina" in Belgium.

Now, when you try to find that stock using that symbol in yahoo finance via the URL https://finance.yahoo.com/lookup, I only get an error "No matching results for 'SOF.BE'".

Does that symbol not exist? Does it only exist for xtb? Does every trading company/service its own set of stock symbols?

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  • Looks like it's SOF.BR on Yahoo – D Stanley May 25 at 13:31
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SOF.BE is a RIC (Refinitiv code) for the Belgian market. The company's primary listing is XBER (Berlin) as SOF.BR. This is the same stocks trading on a different markets (Berlin vs Belgium) in the same currency so the price should be close enough to be identical.

It is usually much easier to find European stocks if you have the ISIN (BE0003717312 for SOF.BE) which is an international standard identifier for stocks as opposed to the RIC which belongs to Refinitiv alone and is not as standardized. The ISIN immediately finds Sofina on all of the websites that I tried including Yahoo finance.

see: Security Identifer

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  • But how do I know what the ISIN is for stock symbols on portals like xtb/xstation? Is there an API I can use to get the ISIN? Some other automatic way? – Alex May 25 at 14:35
  • There is no good, free, automatic way of converting but most companies have their ISIN on the investor relations page of their website. If you are doing this on a large scale or commercially Refinitiv and other data providers provide static data for looking this sort of thing up but the price is high for retail use - ~$24k p.a. – MD-Tech May 25 at 14:41
  • I'd recommend that you check that xtb/xtbstation doesn't provide it in an extra column or something that you can turn on – MD-Tech May 25 at 14:44
  • I checked their API, they do not seem to offer ANY information on the ISIN. – Alex May 25 at 15:24

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