I’m trying to backtest the performance of some rules on the stocks that were within a particular index in 2013. I have what the tickers were when all the stocks were actively traded, but some of them have been de-listed. How can I figure out what ticker the historical data is now listed under?
tl’dr: Go to the search box in the top right corner. Select Advanced Stock Search and then change the setting on that page to Any from Active Only. And good luck.
TMI version:
It’s tough.
Every company on Portfolio123 is identified by its last known ticker. For most companies, that’s going to be what’s on your list. Some will still have shares in some form that traded OTC after the stock was delisted. Enron, for example, is not ENR in our system but ENRNQ^04.
That ^04 means that the company left our database in 2004.
It’s also possible that more than one company used the ticker symbol over that time. If that’s the case then we differentiate with .X, ascending for each one over time. So the first ABC would be something like ABC.1^01, followed by ABC.2^09 and then the third might be ABC, where it’s current.
And that’s the easy part. The problem is that you’ll sometimes bump into non-standard situations where you basically need to figure out what the company was and then figure out where it went.
An olde tyme example would be The Sports Authority. The Sports Authority as you probably know it is in our system as TSA^06. I believe that it was taken private with a leveraged buyout at that time. Standard stuff.
However prior to that, in 2003, Gart Sports merged as equals with The Sports Authority to form a larger The Sports Authority. It was decided that the surviving company would be listed on the exchange under the TSA ticker, but the share history was the Gart shares. So the TSA^06 shares retained the history of Gart Sports prior to 2003 and there is a completely different The Sports Authority series, TSA.Z^03, that is in our database as The Sports Authority - old.
So how do you find the prices for GRTS, the old share prices for Gart? You don’t. They’re part of The Sports Authority’s price history, and there’s no way for the end user to know that the series is GRTS prior to 2003 and TSA thereafter. I’m not sure that there’s any way for us to tell internally. (I happen to know about it because the old TSA was one of the stocks that I covered when I was an analyst.)
We have some signposts that aren’t available to you that can help, but I can tell you that whenever something has to be checked like this I’m usually going through SEC docs, old press releases, and old news sites by hand. I haven’t encountered a situation that I’ve found absolutely nothing about yet, but I can also tell you that the older the situation and the smaller the company, the harder it gets.
2013 is not that long ago, and index stocks tend to be larger so…I guess you have a good sporting chance. 
Paul,
could u please update the reference documents with that very good and detailed explanation. In particular the .X point which i was not aware of.
The examples would also be great in the reference.
Thank you in advance
Jerome
On a related subject, how often are the tickers updated for newly issued equity IPOs and ETF products?
Thanks
Perfect, thanks Paul! Indeed, the companies I’m looking for are young and big enough that they’re coming up no problem.
BTW, I’m able to get this to work in Chrome but not in Safari. If I click on the “Advanced Stock Search” button in Safari, the drop down menu disappears and nothing happens.
Umm…I can ask. From our perspective, data is updated overnight regardless, so the question is really about when it’s added to the database.
I suspect that the answer is that when there’s a price then it’s in the price series database, including when they’re trading when issued. However I recall some delays in the past anyway.
The fundamentals are probably on the same schedule as any other fundamental collection, which is pretty much the larger the company the faster the entry. There’s probably also a notoriety factor. The Lyfts and Ubers of the world are likely at the beginning of the line, regardless of size.
Yes, Safari is broken as described.
We could enhance the Advanced Search to also search past names and tickers. We could also have a point in time search.
Let us know what else we could do with Stock Search. I think there’s potential for something very useful if we understand why and what people want to search.