What Websites do you recommend when looking for a company’s stock ticker symbol when you only have the company name?
–T. Johnson, Via the Internet
A ticker symbol is the unique identification that stock exchanges worldwide give each company. For example, Radio One, the black-owned broadcasting company ranked at No. 8 on the BE INDUSTRIAL/ SERVICE 100 list with $344.7 million in revenues, trades on the Nasdaq stock exchange under the ticker symbol ROIAK. You should also be aware that mutual funds, indexes, and futures have ticker symbols as well.
If you don’t know a company’s ticker symbol, you can find it by going to any number of financial Websites and using their “symbol lookup” function. In most cases, all you’ll need is the name of the company you’re looking for (or even part of the name) and the search function will pull up all similar names in its database. I recommend Yahoo! Finance (http://finance .yahoo.com), which has additional financial tools to help investors research stocks. Another site to explore is the mutual fund research company Morningstar (www.morningstar.com). There you can look up and research mutual fund companies as well as publicly traded corporations.
If you aren’t satisfied with these sites, try going to your favorite search engine and typing in the company name and the words “ticker symbol.” The results should reveal the symbol and any Websites that carry news about the company you’re searching for.