Market Identifier Code - MIC

A “market identifier code,” or MIC, is like a Social Security number for stock markets: each market gets its own.

An MIC is four characters long and begins with “X.” For X-ample...the New York Stock Exchange’s MIC is XNYS.

The purpose of MICs is to allow easy data compilation and comparison between stock markets. There’s been a big push to get every market hooked up with its own MIC, especially as the world moves toward straight-through processing (basically an international automatic payment system). In fact, ISO—the International Standards Organization—is a big fan of market identifier codes, and every month they publish a list of all the MICs out there in the world. So if we’ve got a stock exchange, and we want it to be able to play with and talk to the big boys and girls in the investment world, looks like we should do what we can to avoid dropping the MIC.

Ba-dum tiss.