GOOGLEFINANCE exchange prefixes — and why your ticker fails

You put the market code before the ticker, separated by a colon: =GOOGLEFINANCE("NASDAQ:AAPL","price"). For US large-caps you can usually skip it, but for anything listed outside the US — or any symbol that exists on more than one exchange — the prefix is what stops GOOGLEFINANCE from guessing wrong or returning nothing.

The codes Google Finance uses, by market, with an example in the exact ticker format that market expects:

This one catches almost everyone. In Google Finance, TSE is the Toronto Stock Exchange — =GOOGLEFINANCE("TSE:SHOP"). Tokyo is TYO. And it's TSE, not TSX, even though the exchange brands itself as the TSX. The TSX Venture Exchange is CVE.

Four causes, in rough order of frequency:

• Wrong ticker format for that market. Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Korea and Taiwan use numeric codes — TYO:7203 (Toyota), HKG:0700 (Tencent), not the company name or its US ADR symbol.
• It's a mutual fund. Funds need their own prefix: MUTF: for US funds and MUTF_IN: for Indian ones — e.g. =GOOGLEFINANCE("MUTF_IN:AXIS_ELSS_TAX_1FUN8PD"). Plain fund codes without the prefix always fail.
• The instrument isn't covered.Commodities, many bonds, and smaller foreign listings simply have no GOOGLEFINANCE symbol — no prefix will summon data that isn't there.
• Delisted, renamed, or merged. A ticker that worked last year can return #N/A today.

Look the company up on google.com/financeand read the code off the URL — but watch the order, because it's reversed there. Google Finance shows google.com/finance/quote/SHOP:TSE, while the formula wants the exchange first: =GOOGLEFINANCE("TSE:SHOP"). Flip the two halves and you're done.

• Gold & commodities— there's no reliable spot symbol. Track an ETF instead (GLD for gold, SLV for silver).
• Crypto & FX — use the CURRENCY: pair syntax (CURRENCY:BTCUSD, CURRENCY:EURUSD), and note it only covers a handful of major coins.
• Indexes — no prefix at all; they use dotted codes like .INX (details here).

Delay isn't uniform — it's set per exchange by that exchange's own licensing terms. US listings run about 15–20 minutes behind, while some Asian and European markets are delayed longer, and a few aren't carried at all. So a working prefix still doesn't mean a current price.

Every problem on this page comes from one design choice: GOOGLEFINANCE makes youname the exact listing, in that market's own format, with a code you have to look up first.

Stealth Quotes works the other way around: you type a ticker — or even the company name — and it resolves the listing for you, with values shown in USD. US stocks and crypto stream in real time, with no formula, no colon syntax, and nothing to memorize.