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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.

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  • Have you looked into who is supplying the data for these sites? There is a chance that they may use different delimiters to denote share classes or possibly other components of a stock that may contain special characters that would make it worth noting if there if a FAQ about the tickers listed.
    – JB King
    Commented Sep 4, 2013 at 18:51
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    @JBKing beat me to it, but try replacing them with periods. This is usually used to differentiate between different types/classes of the stock, e.g. common vs. preferred, so some providers will write BRK.A and BRK.B to denote preferred vs. common, while others will write BRK/A and BRK/B. VALE and VALE.P (or VALE/P) are a similar case. Yahoo also uses the ^ to signify indexes, e.g. ^DJI for the Dow Jones.
    – John Bensin
    Commented Sep 4, 2013 at 18:51

3 Answers 3

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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

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  • Actually ISIN is the global unique ID. SEDOL and CUSIP are local identifiers...
    – serverhorror
    Commented Aug 30, 2017 at 18:55
  • A single ISIN can sometimes map onto one or more SEDOL. For example, Vanguard S&P 500 UCITS ETF is traded on the London Stock Exchange as VUSA (GBP) and VUSD (USD). Both have the same ISIN (IE00B3XXRP09) but different SEDOL (B7NLLS3 and B7NLJN4). Such is the case for many London Stock Exchange-listed ETFs that are traded in multiple currencies.
    – Flux
    Commented Jul 5, 2021 at 17:59
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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.

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  • Do you have a source for that?
    – vonjd
    Commented Jun 21, 2021 at 10:46
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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
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  • Meanwhile in Canada we would tend to format as ALP.PR.Q.
    – Chris W. Rea
    Commented May 1, 2020 at 12:12
  • You're fortunate if they only use one format in Canada. It's annoying to have so many formats here in the US.
    – Bob Baerker
    Commented May 1, 2020 at 12:26
  • @Chris W. Rea - Quite a few attractive preferred stocks out there now. They could even become more attractive when rates rise more.
    – Bob Baerker
    Commented Sep 18, 2022 at 1:08
  • Agree. Many perpetuals up here are yielding north of 6% now. There are also many preferred issues here [in Canada] tied to the 5-year Canada government bond rate and many of them are on sale now, too, even though many are bound to reset to a higher coupon over the next few years... assuming no new catastrophes that tank the 5-year yield again.
    – Chris W. Rea
    Commented Sep 26, 2022 at 21:24
  • @Chris W. Rea - I started adding IG issues around 5.5% - too early but who ever knows that except in hindsight. Have been able to stem the losses with intermittent shorting of the lower yield issues. It has been a LOT of work to break even :->). If you are unaware of it, Tim McPartland has a free web site (no agenda) with some really knowledgeable fixed income investors who post. Despite having owned and traded a Pfds for 20 years, a lot of it is above my head. But like Stack, you can get a good answer.
    – Bob Baerker
    Commented Sep 28, 2022 at 15:42

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