I was going to reply only to Karen, but I figure it’s useful for others for more than just finding out what the company name is from the ticker, so…
Chrome and Firefox browsers (and probably others, too) allow for substitution in bookmarks, so here’s a very quick way to find the names of companies, or pull up charts or whatever else you want.
First, grab the basic page you use most often, such as:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=CRTO -or-
[http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=CRTO+Interactive;range=1y...](http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=CRTO+Interactive;range=1y)
(note that TMF will chop these URLs for display purposes – right-click to copy the entire URL, don’t just highlight here and copy/paste!)
From that second URL, you can see the stock symbol being passed (the ?s=CRTO part), and some other stuff defining the type of data (+Interactive is the price graph), and time range (;range=1y tells it to display 1 year). That’s great, and you can save that as a bookmark if you always want to pull up CRTO… but you’d need a bookmark for every single ticker, and that’s totally impractical. For those of us that look at many different stocks every day, here’s the secret sauce:
Bookmark one of those URLs, but then edit the bookmark to instead be:
[http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%s+Interactive;range=1y](http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%s+Interactive;range=1y)
^^
Note the %s I highlighted. That %s in the URL basically tells the browser, “Pull the string that comes next and plug it in here, in place of the %s.”
Next, while you’re still editing the bookmark, add a keyword. This is the most critical part. This keyword will allow you to type the keyword plus the ticker symbol in the URL bar, and magic happens. I use ‘fin’ (no quotes) as my keyword, so when I want to look up a stock, I just type ‘fin [space] [ticker symbol]’ in the URL bar, hit Enter, and voila!
For reference, this is my actual bookmark – my default shows 50- and 200-day simple moving averages on a 6-month chart, with the 50/200 SMA lines being red and green:
[http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=](http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=)**%s**#{%22showSma%22:true,%22smaColors%22:%22#cc0000,#009999%22,%22smaPeriods%22:%22200,50%22,%22smaWidths%22:%221,1%22,%22smaGhosting%22:%220,0%22,%22range%22:%226mo%22}
If you prefer to see basic summary info only, use something like:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=%s
These work for any site, so feel free to change it up and use finance.google.com or even stuff like:
http://www.1ypeg.com/%s
I’d build a bookmark for that with a keyword of something like ‘yy’ (because yp is actually a pain to type quickly) and then be able to type ‘yy CRTO’ on the URL bar and hit Enter.
Magic.
This saves countless keytrokes a day for me… hope you find it useful.