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How to easily convert symbols to sids

Many community members like to set a large custom universe of securities, this is hard in the IDE because of the restrictions placed on dynamically generating Security objects. Here is a way to get the code to initialize a large number of SIDs from a CSV file.

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5 responses

James, did you want to share your us_etfs.csv file so we could tes run the code? I realize you are just demonstrating porpoises, but that could be an interesting file! :) Does the Security object say anything about what it is (stock, ETF, ADR, etc.) ? Thanks.

Paul.

You can get CSVs of US ETFs from http://www.masteretfdata.com/

The Security object contains information about the asset in regards, to its SID, symbol, full name, and trading start/end dates. It doesn't specify the type of Equity. Check out the docs for Security objects.

James

Hi everyone,

Once the list has been created with the symbols() function, can one somehow update the Universe with it, using update_universe() or a similar function?

My apologies, I meant to say: "Once we have a list of sids, ...".

So just by copying and posting the code/list of sids into initialize the universe is updated and set to those securities. The same as if you hard coded in any other list of securities.