Hey, does the api not use the real market ticker names? I’m trying to use it with yahoo, but a lot of the time it says ticker not found.
What is the way around this?
Thanks.
The app and web site use short ticker names. The API uses longer ticker names, having the exchange appended e.g l_EQ. That’s a lower case L for London. I think this format is unique to T212.
Short tickers are not unique and may exist on other exchanges for completely different stocks.
Also stocks which are on two exchanges will have different short tickers.
If you retrieve Instruments data via the API, you’ll see both long and short ticker names.
This is generally true, but in my experience, it is not correct 100% of the time. Your best bet is to get the ISIN of the asset you’re interested, then pull a list of all tradeable assets on T212, then match the ISIN from that list.
You’re absolutely right but, at least in the pre November versions of the API, ISINs were noticeably absent from places I would have expected to find them.
For me, at least, the T212 API story has been a frustrating one.
Yes, it’s a shame you can’t just search by concatenating the ticker and exchange into a unique identifier, e.g. AAPL:NASDAQ or TSCO:LSE
When I built my own database, I had to abandon ISINs and short tickers and just use the long tickers to join (link) my database tables. Of course, ISINs would have been preferred but it was not possible. I also shied away from relying on the short ticker/exchange ID concatenation. As a result, I could not also use short ticker based downloads e.g. Order History.
This all worked OK but would not match data from other APIs.
The “instrument.ticker” string, which T212 also calls unique instrument identifier, is indeed so unique that no other organisation seems to use it. But at least it’s found in all API calls.
Accordingly you always have something to match to the list from the Get All Instruments API call. In there you can find the “workingScheduleId” which you then can, in turn, match to the same field in the Exchanges Metadata call.
And voila, there’s your Exchange to pair with the ISIN. It’s a bit bonkers, but what can you do…