Q. What is a Ticker Symbol

A ticker symbols is a sort of identification tag for a stock. It is comparable to a person's social security number. For instance, if you wanted to find information on Coca-Cola, you could go to a page such as Yahoo Finance and enter "KO" into the symbol box. After pressing the submit button, the site will bring up all the information you need on the Coca-Cola company.

The ticker symbol is used mostly for placing orders with brokers and looking up information on particular company / stock.

You can tell which exchange a stock trades on based on the number of letters in its ticker symbol. Stocks with four or more letters, for example, trade on the NASDAQ.