Ticker symbol
The definition as the field writes it comes first, weaknesses and all. What Entity Bind does about it comes last, in its own paragraph, so you can take one without the other. Filed under identifiers.
The keys company data is joined on, who issues each one, and where each stops being unique.
every figure, with its population →What ticker symbol means
A ticker is the short code an exchange uses for one security. It is the most familiar company identifier and the least suitable as a key. The same symbol means different companies on different exchanges; one company with multiple share classes has several; a company listed in three venues has three; and tickers are reassigned after a delisting, so a historical dataset keyed on ticker alone silently attributes one company's history to another.
The correct unit is the pair of ticker and market, with the market expressed as an ISO 10383 market identifier code rather than as a name. Free-text exchange names — 'NYSE', 'New York Stock Exchange', 'NYSE American' — do not join reliably, and normalising them is its own small reference-data problem.
Tickers are still worth carrying, because they are what a user types and what most external datasets expose. They belong in a crosswalk as a labelled alias with its venue and validity period, not as the primary key of a company record.
Entity Bind sources tickers from EDGAR, which publishes the exchange as free text, and therefore treats a ticker as unambiguous only once the exchange has been normalised to a market identifier code. That normalisation depends on a source that is planned rather than live, and the coverage page lists it as planned.
Where this shows up in Entity Bind
Three pages where this term stops being vocabulary and starts changing an answer, a payload or a price.
- Exchange ticker symbol (Ticker)One listing of one security on one venue. Not a company: a multi-listed company returns one entry per listing, a company with two share classes has two symbols.Open
- Reference dataIdentifier crosswalks, where each fact came from, and what a cited fact has to carry to be usable downstream.Open
- Compared with LSEG PermIDAn open identifier scheme for financial entities, and what a permanent identifier does and does not settle.Open
The fastest way past a definition is a file: which of your rows are the same company, which of your existing matches we would not have made, and what we could not decide.
Start freeThe terms next to this one
Each with its own sentence, because the next question is usually about the word beside this one.
CIK (Central Index Key)
The CIK is the number the US Securities and Exchange Commission assigns to every filer in its EDGAR system, and it is the join key for anything derived from US securities filings.
Crosswalk
A crosswalk is a mapping between the identifier schemes that name the same company in different systems — LEI to company number to CIK to ticker — so that data joined on one key can be joined to data keyed on another.
Reference data
Reference data is the slow-changing, externally defined data used to classify and identify things — registers, code lists, identifier schemes — as opposed to the transactional data that refers to it.
Company number
A company number is the identifier a register assigns to a company at incorporation, and it is unique only within the register that issued it — never within a country and never globally.
The other 8 terms on this shelf
The keys company data is joined on, who issues each one, and where each stops being unique.
Internal fixtures only. The historical 2026-08-29 per-tier recording covers 317 GB companies with identifier-rich arrivals seeding the catalogue first; the context tier includes country and registered-town prose. Its legacy replay has no full-prompt-verified calls and cannot certify current calibration. The September 5 CI reports cover 1,176 labelled pairs and 705 records over 250 companies using offline stubs. These are not independent customer holdouts or live production validation; the 99% minimum-input product target remains unmet. Scope is company and organisation identity only — not people, vessels, bank-account ownership, sanctions or emissions. Results may not be used for eligibility decisions about individuals, including employment, credit and tenancy.
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