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Securities Code

Hi,

how can I identify the correct security ID. For example for CAT I find 2 codes.

Thanks
Davide

1 response

The stock market is a remarkably messy place. It seems pretty straight forward, right? Just put in the symbols, do the trades, and you get a price and a volume. But what you actually get ends up being pretty crazy. You get things like you found - CAT appearing twice.

I do a couple things when I run into that. The first is to look at the data using record() (see backtest below). When I see the results, it often tells me that one of them is the "real" one, and one of them is some one-off set of data. Sometimes you find the company changed names, or went backtrupt and re-issued, stuff like that.

The second thing I do is Google it. For this one, it looks like for whatever reason, CAT traded in a separate offering for a few weeks in the middle of 2005. It might be related to the corporate governance changes they made that month, or not. I didn't get a clear answer. But I got far enough to know that sid(1267) is the meaningful one.

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