What Stock has the ATT Stock Symbol

Many new investors are under the mistaken assumption that the stock ticker symbol 'ATT' is the symbol for the regular AT&T common stock; unfortunately, that is a big mistake. Their symbol is 'T', and has been for several years. A few days ago, when I knew that AT&T (T) dropped in price, I saw an article on Yahoo Finance which discussed the company and noticed in the little graph box on the upper right that ATT was up and wondered how that could be possible. I then noticed that the chart was referring to the 'ATT' stock symbol, not the ATT stock.

If you type ATT into Yahoo (YHOO) Finance, it shows it referring to a company called AT with no profile and no statistics displayed. If you enter it in Google (GOOG) Finance, it shows it referring to AT&T INC, with, again, no profile and no financials. It did have some interesting discussion board topics, such as "This is not the AT&T your looking for....", "What is this stock?", and a new investor poster had bought some of the stock and after realizing it wasn't the "real AT&T", wanted to know how to get out of it. Fortunately, another poster told him to just tell his stock brokerage firm to sell it (although over the last few days, he would have been better off in ATT than T).

I checked the New York Stock Exchange (NYX) website and even the AT&T (T) website, without any enlightenment. I finally discovered that ATT is the stock symbol for a senior note debt offering at a rate of 6.375% due 2056 issued by AT&T Inc. in February of 2007. Interest is paid on February 15, May 15, August 15 and November 15. The Senior Notes may be redeemed at any time on or after February 15, 2012 at 100% of the principal amount plus accrued and unpaid interest to the redemption date.

These listed traded senior notes are what I refer to as minibonds or microbonds. They are bonds that are traded just like stocks on the NYSE or American Stock Exchange for around $25 per share. They are very similar to preferred stocks except that they pay interest instead of dividends and they generally have a specific maturity date. They are also referred to as PINES (Public Income Notes) or QUIBS (Quarterly Interest Bonds) or QUICS (Quarterly Income Capital Securities) or QUIDS (Quarterly Income Debt Securities).

By Fred Fuld at Stockerblog.com