CUSIP
A nine-character identifier for a specific security issued in the United States or Canada.
Updated 2026-07-26
A CUSIP identifies an instrument rather than a company: the ordinary shares, the preferred shares and each bond of one issuer all carry different CUSIPs. The first six characters identify the issuer, the next two the specific issue, and the last is a check digit.
Fund holdings are reported by CUSIP, which is what makes it possible to say that two managers hold the same security rather than merely two securities with similar names. Matching those CUSIPs back to a company page is a separate step, and where it fails we show the reported issuer name as filed instead of inventing a link.
CUSIP data is commercially licensed in bulk. What appears here is only what public filings themselves contain, quoted from those filings.
Related terms
4 entries- Entity resolution
- Deciding whether two records from different sources describe the same company or person.
- Form 13F
- A quarterly report in which a large institutional manager lists the U.S. equity positions it held on the last day of the quarter.
- LEI
- A twenty-character global identifier for a legal entity that takes part in financial transactions.
- Ticker symbol
- The short code under which a security trades on a particular venue.