Readers Have Trouble with Ticker Symbols – Some Brokers Won’t List Floating Rate Issues

Probably the largest number of notes we get are from readers that have trouble with ticker symbols.  This is really nothing new–preferred stock ticker symbols have been an issue for everyone for years and years.

Unfortunately we have no real answer to the problem.  Below we list a security that reader LeRoy wrote to us about this morning.

Preferred Stock  – Morgan Stanley Floating Rate Preferred (4% Min)

Google Ticker  MS-A

Yahoo Ticker MS-PA

eTrade Ticker  MS.PR.A

Fidelity Ticker MS/PA

Intrinio  MS$A

I could go on and on but there is no need.  You have 2 choices.  1st you can simply search the broker website you are using until you find the info you need—or you can call them up and ask for the ticker you need.

Additionally it us our understanding that some of the online brokers will NOT quote–or sell some of the floating rate issues. We don’t know what the real logic is with this action, but suspect that they believe these issues are too complicated for us common folk. In fact while I was able to pull the above issue up on Fidelity it had a note “Fidelity does not provide further research on this issue”–there was a ‘trade’ button available though.

Another issue we have on a rarer occassion is that we haven’t updated a spreadsheet.  For instance reader Ivory wrote on a couple MLP’s he couldn’t find.  In this case the issues had recently merged with another MLP and we didn’t have the spreadsheet reflecting these mergers.  It happens–we can run late on getting occasional changes updated since we do all the work ourselves and there is no paid help to get things current.