Can a ticker symbol change?

Yes. Companies change symbols after mergers, rebrands or exchange moves. Facebook became META in 2022. Old symbols are eventually reassigned to other companies.

Why does Berkshire Hathaway have two tickers?

BRK.A and BRK.B are two share classes of the same company. Class B shares were created in 1996 so ordinary investors could buy in without paying the six-figure Class A price.

What does a ticker ending in Q mean?

A fifth-letter Q historically signals that the company has filed for bankruptcy. Such shares are extremely risky because shareholders are last in line for any recovery.

What Is a Ticker Symbol? Stock Tickers Explained

AAPL, MSFT, NVDA. These short codes appear in every news story and on every trading screen. A ticker symbol is the unique abbreviation an exchange assigns to a security so it can be identified without ambiguity.

The name comes from the ticker tape machines of the 1860s that printed prices on a paper strip. The paper is gone, but the codes remain the universal shorthand of the market.

How tickers are assigned

When a company lists, it requests a symbol and the exchange approves it if it is available. Companies pick memorable ones: Harley-Davidson chose HOG, Southwest Airlines chose LUV after its home airport, Love Field.

Historically NYSE symbols had one to three letters and Nasdaq symbols had four. That distinction has faded; a company can move exchanges and keep its symbol, and both now allow one to five characters.

Suffixes, dots and share classes

Some companies issue more than one class of share. Berkshire Hathaway trades as BRK.A, the famous six-figure share, and BRK.B, a far cheaper class with fewer voting rights. Alphabet trades as GOOGL (with votes) and GOOG (without).

Different data providers write these differently: BRK.B, BRK-B or BRK/B all mean the same thing. On this site we use the dash form in URLs.

Outside the US, tickers carry exchange suffixes: SHOP.TO is Shopify in Toronto, and 7203.T is Toyota in Tokyo, where tickers are numbers.

A ticker is not a company name

Look-alike tickers cause real mistakes. When Zoom Video went public as ZM, a tiny unrelated firm with the symbol ZOOM soared as investors bought the wrong one. Twitter’s IPO briefly lifted a bankrupt retailer called Tweeter (TWTRQ).

Always confirm the company name and exchange before placing an order, especially with short or generic-looking symbols.

Tickers for things that are not companies

ETFs have tickers too: SPY and VOO track the S&P 500, QQQ tracks the Nasdaq-100. Indexes are quoted with a caret or dollar prefix on many platforms, such as ^GSPC for the S&P 500 itself.

A ticker with a Q on the end usually means the company is in bankruptcy proceedings. Delisted companies can trade over the counter with a five-letter code ending in F or Y.

What Is a Ticker Symbol? How to Read AAPL, BRK.B and More