Ticker symbols

QCan you explain stocks’ ticker symbols? — P.D., Santa Rosa

AA ticker symbol is a unique identifier for a company’s stock. On the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), tickers generally used to have three or fewer letters, while stocks trading on the Nasdaq Stock Market usually had four or five letters. That made it easy to see where companies such as Nike (NYSE: NKE), Visa (NYSE: V), Home Depot (NYSE: HD), Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Amazon.com (Nasdaq: AMZN) were traded.

Today, though, NYSE stocks frequently sport four letters, while Nasdaq stocks might have three or fewer. Examples include Levi Strauss (NYSE: LEVI), Charles Schwab (NYSE: SCHW), Facebook (Nasdaq: FB), Hasbro (Nasdaq: HAS) and Pepsico (Nasdaq: PEP).

Companies with several classes of shares often have multiple ticker symbols, and some tickers have meaningful suffixes attached. An F or a Y following a Nasdaq ticker, for example, indicates a foreign company. Other exchanges may use a Q to indicate that a company is in bankruptcy. Mutual fund tickers are four letters plus an X.

To find a company’s ticker symbol online, visit a website such as Fool.com and type the company name in the search box. Newspaper stock listings also usually include ticker symbols.

QWhat’s a “closing tick”? — M.B., Kansas City, Missouri

AIt reflects the overall market sentiment at the end of the trading day. An “uptick” means a stock’s last trade occurred at a price higher than the previous one, and a “downtick” is the opposite.

The closing tick is the difference between the number of stocks that closed on an uptick and the number that closed on a downtick. It’s not very useful for us longterm investors, and you needn’t pay it much attention.