What Is a Stock Ticker?

By Kristi Waterworth – Updated Feb 22, 2025 at 9:22 AM EST

Key Points

Stock ticker symbols like NFLX help identify specific stocks on exchanges like Nasdaq.
Modifiers in tickers signal investment specifics, e.g., "A" for Class A shares.
Understanding stock tickers simplifies tracking and trading various securities.

Stock ticker symbols are codes that represent publicly traded companies in the stock market. Although a stock's ticker, strictly speaking, is distinct from its ticker symbol, most investors use the term stock ticker as shorthand for its ticker symbol. The ticker itself is the constantly updating stream of information about a stock, and the ticker symbol is its code, consisting of between one and four letters.

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Netflix's ticker symbol and current stock price. — Image source: The Motley Fool.

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Stock ticker codes or symbols were originally created to shorten publicly traded company names on ticker tape printed by brokerage houses. Today, a stock ticker helps you search for a specific stock online and perhaps make a trade using your brokerage's website.

Although most stock ticker symbols are composed of three or four letters, some older companies have one- or two-letter tickers. Mutual funds and many foreign companies have five-letter ticker symbols. Most ticker symbols are either abbreviations of companies' names -- such as ABNB for Airbnb (ABNB -1.32%) -- or somehow related to the company, such as Petco's (WOOF +3.53%) clever choice of WOOF.

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Stock

A stock represents an ownership interest in a business. When a business wants to raise money, its board of directors determines the number of shares to issue.

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Stock tickers are fundamental to investing

Stock tickers are useful because they can help you search for and find specific companies and funds, avoiding the confusion that can be caused when organizations or funds have similar names. Understanding modifiers is also useful, although it's not always necessary.

Over time, you are likely to start memorizing the stock ticker symbols for your favorite companies, which can make keeping up with the performances of your investments easier and faster.

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About the Author

Kristi Waterworth has been a contributing real estate and financial expert at The Motley Fool, covering real estate, investing, and personal finance topics, since 2020. Kristi has been interviewed by various TV media outlets and podcasts for her real estate investing expertise – from residential real estate to digital real estate and everything in between. Kristi’s journalist career spans over 25 years, and she has written about real estate investing, homeownership, and home construction specifically for the last decade. She was also previously a licensed Realtor and general building contractor before the Great Recession and housing market collapse. She holds a bachelor’s degree in American history from Columbia College in Missouri.

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Kristi Waterworth has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Airbnb, Berkshire Hathaway, Fairfax Financial, Netflix, and Tencent. The Motley Fool recommends Nasdaq. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Stock ticker examples

While every stock exchange has its own rules for ticker symbols, it's helpful to understand broadly how stock tickers can appear. Most of the variation is caused by the modifiers, which below are explained from A to Z:

A: Denotes the Class A version of a stock, which confers certain rights and privileges to shareholders that may not be available to holders of other classes of a company's stock.

B: Denotes the Class B version of a stock, which generally confers fewer rights and privileges than Class A stock, or it may be priced to be affordable to individual investors.

C: Indicates that a company no longer meets the listing requirements of a stock exchange but has not yet been delisted.

D: Signifies newly issued shares or a reverse stock split.

E: Assigned to companies that are delinquent in filing with the SEC.

F: Reserved for companies listed on foreign exchanges.

G: For first convertible bonds, which can be converted into shares of stock at a specified stock price. First convertible bond owners are paid first in the event of asset liquidation or bankruptcy.

H: For second convertible bonds, which also are convertible into stock. Second convertible bond owners are paid second in the event of liquidation or bankruptcy.

I: Denotes third convertible bonds, which are convertible into stock and whose owners are paid third and last in the event of bankruptcy.

J: Used by the Nasdaq exchange to denote, in relation to shareholder votes, which stocks have voting rights.

K: Used by the Nasdaq exchange in the same context to denote the absence of shareholder voting rights.

L: Something of a catch-all variation and used differently by different exchanges.

M: For fourth-class preferred shares, which are preferred shares that have the fourth-highest dividend payment priority in the event of a cash shortfall for a company. Preferred shares are a type of fixed-income security that pays a guaranteed dividend, unlike common shares.

N: Denotes third-class preferred shares, for which guaranteed dividends are paid ahead of fourth-class preferred shares.

O: Signifies second-class preferred shares, which have the second-strongest guarantee of the dividend being paid.

P: For first-class preferred shares, which have the most liquidity because the dividend guarantee is the strongest.

Q: Indicates a company that has filed for bankruptcy protection.

R: Denotes a stock rights offering, which is designed to enable a company to issue additional shares of stock without diluting existing shareholders' ownership percentages. Stock rights allow existing shareholders only to buy new shares of a stock at a lower price than new buyers.

S: Shares of beneficial interest, which are a security type that confers the right to the income generated by an asset without transferring ownership of the asset itself.

T: Denotes stock warrants or rights. Warrants are a lot like stock options.

U: Used for new issues and typically groups shares of a stock, along with any warrants or rights that have been attached.

V: Denotes stock that is trading before it has been formally issued. The Nasdaq exchange permits some institutional investors to buy stocks "when issued" that will soon have their initial public offerings, or IPOs. The trade is made official after the IPO.

W: For warrants to buy a stock. Note that sometimes WS will be used instead of W, but there is no difference.

X: Used by all mutual funds.

Y: Indicates the stock is an American depositary receipt (ADR), a type of security that allows foreign stocks to trade on U.S. exchanges. The company still trades on a foreign exchange, with the ADR converting the stock's foreign value to dollars for U.S. investors.

Z: Another letter that is used differently by different exchanges.

A few other modifiers are:

OB: Short for over-the-counter (OTC) bulletin board, which denotes a stock that trades on the OTC market.

PK: Stands for pink sheet, synonymous with OTC. Both pink sheet and OTC stocks do not trade on major exchanges but via broker networks (that formerly relied on actual pink sheets of paper).

SC: Denotes a company trading on the Nasdaq Capital Markets exchange, which is smaller and has less stringent listing requirements.

Note that many of these modifiers apply only to quotations directly from stock exchanges, and you are not likely to see them as a nonprofessional investor. Here are some of the stock ticker modifiers you are likely to see:

What Is a Stock Ticker?

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