Why Financial Indexes Lack a Universal Identifier
Summary
The document addresses how to identify a particular financial index when providers publish many strategy, currency, or other variants under similar names. Its example is a family of hedge fund indexes whose labels differ by strategy and currency, making informal names ambiguous. The discussion says there is no universally adopted identifier scheme that guarantees the same index will be named consistently across providers and systems.
Instead, market participants commonly maintain several symbologies: one used by a counterparty, another by accounting software, internal tools, or a data provider. Bloomberg’s open symbology is mentioned as one available option, but it does not resolve the broader lack of industry-wide agreement. The practical lesson is to map and manage identifiers across sources and to specify the exact variant required. The answer is a concise practitioner observation rather than a technical comparison of identifier standards or a detailed implementation guide.
Key ideas
- Index names can refer to multiple variants that differ by strategy, currency, or other characteristics.
- The document reports no universally adopted identifier scheme shared across index providers.
- Market participants may need to reconcile identifiers from counterparties, accounting systems, internal tools, and data vendors.
- An available open symbology can help, but does not guarantee universal naming consistency.
- Clear identification requires specifying the intended index variant and maintaining mappings across sources.
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Full text
# Is there a de-facto standard identifier scheme for indexes? # Is there a de-facto standard identifier scheme for indexes? All the big indexes have well known fairly standard ticker like names, e.g. SPX for the S&P 500. However there are huge numbers of lesser known indexes (and a huge number of variants on each). Are there actual or de-facto standards for identifying indexes, e.g. like CUSIP or ISIN values or ticker/exchange pairs for equities. E.g. if I talk about the Credit Suisse AllHedge index I can find all these variants: - DJ CS ALL HEDGE - DJ CS ALL HEDGE CONVRT ARBITRG - DJ CS ALL HEDGE DEDCT SH BIAS - DJ CS ALL HEDGE EMER MKTS - DJ CS ALL HEDGE EQ MKT NUETRAL - DJ CS ALL HEDGE EVENT DRIVEN - DJ CS ALL HEDGE FIXED INC ARB - DJ CS ALL HEDGE GLOBAL MACRO - DJ CS ALL HEDGE L/S EQUITY - DJ CS ALL HEDGE MANAGED FUTURS - DJ CS ALL HEDGE MULTI-STRATEGY Plus, in addition to USD, there are GBP, EUR, CHF and JPY variants of each. Is there a standard identifier scheme to allow me to be absolutely clear in the above example which variant I'm interested in? Ideally one that's agreed across index providers. Or are we doomed to use names that are subject to personal wording choices, e.g. one person may write "Credit Suisse", another "CS", or "AllHedge" instead of "All Hedge" etc? ## Answer by chollida (score 3) https://quant.stackexchange.com/a/20772 No there is no `"One True Symbology"`. Infact its even worse as it used to be teh case that some symbologies were proprietary, and we eneded up with Rics, Cusips, Isins, bloomberg tickers, etc. Bloomberg has at least released their open symbology for everyone to use: http://bsym.bloomberg.com/sym/ Though you could probably say that the move is a bit self serving:). What ends up happening is that you often resort to using several symbologies, - 1 from from the counterparty you trade with. - 1 for your back end accounting software - 1 for your internal tools - 1 for historical data you get from your data provider(Exchange or data aggregator) As someone who is a plumber in this industry, I think symbology is one of the worst parts of this industry. TL/DR Your going to need to be flexible in how you name things as everyone else will want to use a different name for the same instruments.
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