Y

What is ‘Y’

A letter that appears on a Nasdaq stock symbol specifying that a particular stock is an American Depositary Receipt. An American Depositary Receipt (ADR) is a negotiable certificate that represents one or more shares of foreign stock or a fraction of a share. ADRs are traded on a U.S. exchange and are issued by a U.S. depositary bank. ADRs were introduced in response to the difficulties involved with buying shares in foreign corporations, including the challenges of trading at different prices and currency values. U.S. banks and brokerages can purchase bulk lots of shares from the foreign corporation, bundle the shares into groups and reissue them as ADRs on the New York Stock Exchange, American Stock Exchange or the Nasdaq.

Explaining ‘Y’

Nasdaq listed securities have four or five characters. When a fifth character appears, it identifies the issue as being one that is other than a single issue of common stock or capital stock. The Y identifies the stock as an American Depositary Receipt. These issues have distinct advantages in that they are a convenient and cost-effective method of buying shares in a foreign corporation. When an investor buys or sells ADRS, he or she is trading in the U.S. market and the trade will clear in U.S. dollars. Investors can invest internationally in a variety of ways including ADRs, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, U.S.-traded foreign stocks or direct investments in foreign markets.

Further Reading

  • Convertible debt issuance, capital structure change and financing-related information: Some new evidence – www.sciencedirect.com [PDF]
  • Neural networks in finance and economics forecasting – www.worldscientific.com [PDF]
  • Network science: a useful tool in economics and finance – link.springer.com [PDF]
  • Fractional white noise calculus and applications to finance – www.worldscientific.com [PDF]
  • Finance-growth nexus in China revisited: New evidence from principal components and ARDL bounds tests – www.sciencedirect.com [PDF]
  • Qualitative reasoning in business, finance, and economics: Introduction – www.sciencedirect.com [PDF]
  • … Evolutiva y alguna de sus aplicaciones en Economía y Finanzas//An Introduction to Evolutionary Computation and some of its Applications in Economics and Finance – www.upo.es [PDF]
  • Promoting the Growth of Medium and Small-sized Enterprises through the Development of Medium and Small-sized Financial Institutions [J] – en.cnki.com.cn [PDF]