In
finance
Finance refers to monetary resources and to the study and Academic discipline, discipline of money, currency, assets and Liability (financial accounting), liabilities. As a subject of study, is a field of Business administration, Business Admin ...
, an option symbol is a code by which
options are identified on an options exchange or a
futures exchange
A futures exchange or futures market is a central financial exchange where people can trade standardized futures contracts defined by the exchange. Futures contracts are derivatives contracts to buy or sell specific quantities of a commodity or ...
.
History
Before 2010, the ticker (trading) symbols for US options typically looked like this: ''IBMAF''.
This consisted of a ''root symbol'' ('IBM') + ''month code'' ('A') + ''
strike price
In finance, the strike price (or exercise price) of an option is a fixed price at which the owner of the option can buy (in the case of a call), or sell (in the case of a put), the underlying security or commodity. The strike price may be set ...
'' code ('F'). The root symbol is the symbol of the stock on the stock exchange. After this comes the month code, A-L mean January–December
calls, M-X mean January–December
puts. The strike price code is a letter corresponding with a certain strike price (which letter corresponds with which strike price depends on the stock).
On February 12, 2010, the five-character ticker format stopped being used in the US and Canada.
The new standard is now fully in place, as in the first few months after February 12 the
LEAP roots and additional roots needed to handle large numbers of options for a given issuer were consolidated into a single root ticker for a given underlying symbol.
Options Clearing Corporation
Options Clearing Corporation (OCC) is a United States clearing house based in Chicago. It specializes in equity derivatives clearing, providing central counterparty (CCP) clearing and settlement services to 16 exchanges. It was started by ...
's (OCC) Options Symbology Initiative (OSI) mandated an industry-wide change to a new option symbol structure, resulting in option symbols 21 characters in length. March 2010 - May 2010 was the symbol consolidation period in which all outgoing option roots will be replaced with the underlying stock symbol.
On March 18, 2013,
CBOE
Cboe Global Markets, Inc. is an American company that owns the Chicago Board Options Exchange and the stock exchange operator BATS Global Markets.
History
Founded by the Chicago Board of Trade in 1973 and member-owned for several decades, the ...
Mini Options became available for trading on a select group of securities (AMZN, AAPL, GOOG, GLD, and SPY). These options represent a deliverable of 10 shares of an underlying security, whereas standard equity options represent a deliverable of 100 shares. CBOE appended a "7" to the end of the security symbol to represent the mini option contracts. These options series were discontinued on Dec. 17, 2014, not so long after their introduction, and mini options on stocks and ETFs no longer trade.
The OCC Option Symbol
The OCC option symbol consists of four parts:
# Root symbol of the underlying stock or
ETF, padded with spaces to 6 characters
# Expiration date, 6 digits in the format yymmdd
# Option type, either P or C, for put or call
# Strike price, as the price x 1000 (adjusted dollars and thousandths of a dollar or
mills
Mills is the plural form of mill, but may also refer to:
As a name
* Mills (surname), a common family name of English or Gaelic origin
* Mills (given name)
*Mills, a fictional British secret agent in a trilogy by writer Manning O'Brine
Places U ...
), front padded with 0s to 8 digits
Examples:
SPX 141122P00019500
The above symbol represents a put on SPX, expiring on 11/22/2014, with a strike price of $19.50.
LAMR 150117C00052500
The above symbol represents a call on LAMR, expiring on 1/17/2015, with a strike price of $52.50. The OCC option symbol can be mapped to other identifiers, such as a Financial Instrument Global Identifier (FIGI).
Mini Options
Mini-options contracts trade under a different trading symbol than standard-sized options contracts. Mini-options carry the number "7" at the end of the security symbol. For example, the Apple mini-options symbol is AAPL7.
Examples:
AAPL7 131101C00470000
The above symbol represents a mini call option (10 shares) on AAPL, with a strike price of $470, expiring on Nov 1, 2013
AAPL 131101C00470000
The above symbol represents the standard call option (100 shares), with the same strike and expiration date.
See also
*
Stock symbols
A ticker symbol or stock symbol is an abbreviation used to uniquely identify publicly traded shares of a particular stock or security on a particular stock exchange. Ticker symbols are arrangements of symbols or characters (generally Latin lette ...
References
{{Reflist
Options (finance)
Symbols
Security identifier types
Financial metadata