As you noticed while you were buying shares of Walmart, all brokerages (simulated or not) require you to input the company's stock symbol to place any trade. In fact, all stock exchanges employ stock ticker symbols.
Why Symbols?
When a company is first listed on a stock exchange, the company is assigned a unique stock symbol. No other company listed on that exchange can ever use that ticker symbol, and thus all participants in the stock market have a universal, foolproof way to correctly identify companies on an exchange. The ticker symbols are chosen by the companies themselves and can be as few as one letter or as many as five.
For example, Ford Motors is simply ‘F'. Sometimes the ticker resembles the company name (Microsoft uses ‘MSFT'), while others are used somewhat as a marketing ploy (Anheuser-Busch Companies Inc, the makers of Budweiser Beer, trades under ‘BUD'). Another reason for the use of standardized stock symbols is that it minimizes trading mix-ups. One company's name may be quite similar to another's - in spelling, in sound or in an abbreviated format.
Note: Newspapers and other publications often put a company's abbreviation in brackets after the company's first reference in a story. For example, a newspaper may denote Hewlett-Packard Incorporated as HP. This is NOT necessarily the ticker symbol, but rather a shortened standard name for the firm in question. To avoid incorrect stock selection, we recommend that you always look up a company's ticker symbol. It's also much easier to enter shorter symbols. Imagine having to type in "Hewlett-Packard Company" instead of ‘HPQ'.
Using the Symbol Look Up
To buy shares of a company you're interested in, you must know its ticker symbol. Never guess a ticker symbol - you could end up buying shares of the wrong company. Fortunately, all major brokerages offer symbol lookup tools with their accounts. Let's find some ticker symbols using the Simulator's Research tool.
Let's research the ticker symbols for a stock: Nike.
First: Click on the Research Tab in order to proceed to the symbol lookup screen.
Now, type "Nike" into the symbol look up field and press the icon to the right to begin the search.
You should see a search result pop up in a new window and look similar to what's shown here:
Now that you've learned about stock symbols and how to find them, let's look at how to determine which stocks you want to buy based on your analysis of financial information.