Permanent instrument identifier

Also seen as: permanent instrument ID, permanent identifier

Why does an instrument need an identifier other than its ticker?

A ticker symbol says where an instrument trades today, not which instrument it is. Three ordinary events break a ticker-based identity:

• Renames — a company rebrands and its symbol changes, splitting one price history into two records that look unrelated.
• Reuse — after a delisting a symbol becomes available again and can be assigned to a different company, so one symbol can cover two unrelated histories.
• Cross-listings — the same company can trade under different symbols on different exchanges.

A permanent identifier removes all three problems at once. The symbol becomes a display label that is free to change, while every price, filing, and index-membership record stays attached to the same underlying instrument.

Defaults in Fincanva

• Every instrument in the catalogue carries a permanent identifier; the ticker you search on and read on screen is a label attached to it.
• Fincanva references instruments by their permanent identifier rather than by ticker string — a strategy's benchmark instrument, for example, is stored that way, and a screener's matches come back identified the same way — see screener execution and caching.
• Delisted instruments keep their permanent identifier, so their history stays reachable after trading has stopped and a backtest can still hold them for the period they traded.
• These identifiers are internal rather than readable codes. You never need to type or know one: you search by ticker or name, and Fincanva resolves it.

Worked example

A company listed as ABC rebrands, and its shares begin trading as XYZ. Under a ticker-based identity this looks like two instruments — ABC with history up to the rename date, XYZ with history from it — and a ten-year backtest spanning the rename would either stop at the old symbol or start late at the new one. Because Fincanva keys the instrument by its permanent identifier, both stretches are one series on one instrument: a strategy that held it before the rename still holds it after, and the run reads a full ten years of prices instead of two truncated fragments. The same protection applies in reverse — if the freed symbol ABC is later assigned to a different company, that company is a separate instrument with its own permanent identifier, so the two histories never merge.