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What is a Ticker Symbol

By , About.com Guide

Question: What is a Ticker Symbol
Answer: A ticker symbols is a sort of identification tag for a stock. It is comparable to a person's social security number. For instance, if you wanted to find information on Coca-Cola, you could go to a page such as Yahoo Finance and enter "KO" into the symbol box. After pressing the submit button, the site will bring up all the information you need on the Coca-Cola company.

The ticker symbol is used mostly for placing orders with brokers and looking up information on particular company / stock.

You can tell which exchange a stock trades on based on the number of letters in its ticker symbol. Stocks with four or more letters, for example, trade on the NASDAQ.

For more information, read the article How to Research an Investment.

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