Question by frozen555: How do you keep track of companies that change both their stock symbol and their name at the same time?
Is there an official publicly accessible database that you can check online? I have a list of stock symbols. I have like 1000-2000 stock symbols, and very often the symbols change. Sometimes a company just “disappears.” I don’t know why they do that. The company stays in business, but it changes its name and symbol. Can I get notified about these changes when they happen?

I know I could keep track of the changes if I bought 1 share of every stock, because then I would see all these stocks in my portfolio, and they couldn’t escape from me no matter how hard they try, BUT… I don’t have the money to do that. There must be a cheaper way. (?)

Best answer:

Answer by u4Ea_
This is fairly difficult. I have a few solutions for you, but none are optimal. If you had a professional tool like Bloomberg or Factset, you could do something more automated, but these are certainly not free.

Solutions:

(1) Load your entire list of names you follow into a portfolio into something like finance.yahoo.com with one share each. (You don’t have to buy anything!) When there is a split, a name change, a ticker change, etc, it will give you an alert like “[alert]Alert: A split, merger or similar event has occurred.” with a button to press that will show you the name changes, ticker changes, etc

Other services where you might load your portfolio would give a new story item for a name change / symbol change. Some inexpensive pay service such as www.briefing.com might work nice for this, as you can set up email alterts, etc.

(2) Look up sp500, sp400, sp600 changes are here:

http://www2.standardandpoors.com/portal/site/sp/en/us/page.topic/indices_500/2,3,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,3,2,0,0,50,0,0.html

http://www2.standardandpoors.com/portal/site/sp/en/us/page.topic/indices_400/2,3,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,3,2,0,0,50,0,0.html

http://www2.standardandpoors.com/portal/site/sp/en/us/page.topic/indices_600/2,3,1,0,0,0,0,0,0,3,2,0,0,50,0,0.html

These 1500 companies might or might not cover all your names.

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Just a note on why name changes, cusip changes, etc – usually it is a merger or acquisition for a name change. Sometimes it is because a company has been delisted or is delinquent in filing its financial statements. (more here: http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/04/022004.asp ) The cusip (a 9-digit identifier) changes even more often, when there is a split, etc.

Hope that helps!

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