Portfolio123 Support for Non-primary Stock Issues

Hi All,
The team have been working hard to improve the way stocks are handled with respect to multiple issues per company, especially to more robustly handle situations where the primary share class is switched.
[color=crimson]The release is scheduled for tomorrow, March 7th, after market close (16:00 EST)[/color].

[size=4]What is changing?[/size]
Until now, multiple issues were handled by representing a company by the symbol of its primary issue, rebinding to the other issues for historical ranks, screens, and backtests. Moving forward, each supported stock issue will be listed as the latest symbol assigned thereunto. For the most part, you shouldn’t see much, if any, difference in the results of your historical ranks, screens, and backtests. Note that only the primary issue for a company will appear in universes at any given date, just as it has worked in the past. This change also means that tracking non-primary-issue positions will be supported moving forward in your live portfolios and books.

[size=4]How will this impact you?[/size]
The main impact this will have on the way you use Portfolio123 will be in how you use custom lists, restriction lists, and [font=courier new]Ticker[/font]/[font=courier new]UnivExclude[/font]/[font=courier new]UnivInclude[/font] rules. Users wishing to exclude a company’s offerings completely will have to add each offering’s symbol to a list or [font=courier new]Ticker[/font] rule. As such, we will be automatically be adding new symbols to custom lists and restriction lists to include any additional offerings which will be added to the system tomorrow.
As for [font=courier new]Ticker[/font]/[font=courier new]UnivExclude[/font]/[font=courier new]UnivInclude[/font] rules, you will need to manually add or change the symbols to reflect this new behavior. For example, any system previously eliminating [font=courier new]BRK.A[/font] by specifying [font=courier new]!Ticker(“BRK.B”)[/font] or [font=courier new]UnivExclude(“BRK.B”)[/font] will no longer exclude [font=courier new]BRK.A[/font], but only [font=courier new]BRK.B[/font]. Affected users will need to change the rule to ![font=courier new]Ticker(“BRK.A”)[/font] and [font=courier new]UnivExclude/font, respectively.

Will this affect share counts? Will BRK.A and BRK.B have different share counts and therefore different market caps? Or will all the fields be identical except for volume and price? Regarding volume, I guess I assumed that the volume traded of a company represented by two share classes was the sum of the two. I don’t know if that was the case or not. Will it be the case going forward? Will they have different floats?

Aaron,

Sounds good. Thank you for all the hard work!

//dpa

Yuval:
Any technical factors which are derived from a stock instead of its company will behave exactly the same, since the stock which would have been primary at that time will still be considered primary by the system. It’s largely a semantic distinction as far as the data goes.