The Intrinio API has both companies and securities. This article clears up common misconceptions about these two entities.
Companies
An Intrinio "company" represents a public corporation traded on a US exchange. In order to show up in our API, a company must meet the following criteria:
- Publicly traded on a US exchange
- Required to file a 10-K form with the SEC
Companies that will not show up in the API include:
- Privately-held companies that do not trade on a US exchange
- International companies that do not trade on a US exchange
- Companies that are not required to file a 10-K form with the SEC
The only caveat to this is that we are starting to add ADRs/foreign issuers, which file 20-F and 40-F forms.
A company will have a name and trading symbol/ticker that corresponds to its present representation in the markets.
Our company master is maintained by our data quality team, so if you spot any discrepancies, you can file a ticket from your account page.
Securities
An Intrinio "security" is a financial instrument (like a stock or ETF) that traded on a stock exchange at a point in time. Here are some finer points on our security dataset.
- All Intrinio securities have stock prices associated with them - we do not keep records of securities that have never traded, for example.
- An Intrinio company can and typically does have many Intrinio securities - even within the US.
- An Intrinio company can have multiple Intrinio securities that traded at different times. This is typically because the company's trading symbol changed or the security started trading on a different exchange. When this happens:
- We create a new Intrinio security, even though the new security represents the shares of the same stock class in the same company - this is an important distinction.
- We copy stock prices from the old security over to the new one, so there is a continuity of prices for those shares.
- The old security becomes inactive and is no longer preferred for symbol lookups in the API (since another security may assume its old ticker symbol, now being freed up).
- You can still find the old security in the API, which is useful for backtesting stock price data in a point-in-time fashion.
- We do this so that our security master has point-in-time integrity, meaning you can pick any point in time and see which symbols traded on which exchanges, and which companies they represented - at that point in time. This may be a source of confusion for users who assume all of our securities are active.
If you have further questions, please feel free to chat with us at intrinio.com or reach out to your customer success manager.