Stock Symbol of a comoany

Each company has a stock symbol used for identification. This symbol makes it easier to list the stock on exchanges such as the New York Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ, where stocks are bought and sold. Before you can find the proper stock symbol for a company, you need to know the company's proper name. Because some companies have their names boldly written on the items they sell, you can easily identify the products they make. For example, you can guess that Nike shoes are made Nike. However, the names of some products are not necessarily the names of the companies that make them. For example, the snack food Doritos is made by Frito-Lay, which is owned by PepsiCo, Inc.-the same company that makes Pepsi-Cola, Mountain Dew, Slice, and Tropicana. If the product is easily available such as candy or potato chips, you can usually find the name of the company on the container or wrapper.

If you have no clue about who makes a particular product (or delivers a particular service), you can always do a search of the product on the Internet using one of the search engines like Google or Yahoo. The result of your search should produce the name of the companies that make the products in which you are interested in investing. If you use the search functions in the sites of financial publications, you may even find the stock symbols of these companies because they are often included in financial articles.

Once you have the proper name of the company that you are interested in investing in, you need to know the stock symbol in order to get more information about the company. These days, nearly all investment sites will give you stock symbols if you type in the name (or part of the name) of a company.

When you type in a stock symbol in the various financial websites, you will see the latest financial information about the company. The first group of information that you are likely to see after typing in a stock symbol in a financial website include the latest stock price, the change in price from the previous day, the number of shares outstanding, the market capitalization, and a host of other financial information.