Why do I get a ‘Page not found’ error for my custom hyperlink?

Ticker Toolkit™ allows you to create custom hyperlinks to your trusted news and information sources (different websites).  The example workbooks that are included with Ticker Toolkit™ include sample custom hyperlinks that you can use and that will serve as examples for your own custom hyperlinks.  While your hyperlinks allow you to easily research multiple information sources for each stock in your workbook, they are subject to the differences in symbol notations of each information source website.  The stock symbol used by one website may be different from the stock symbol used by another website.  You’ll typically see these symbol differences with stocks that offer different classes of shares (e.g. A and B shares).  The result is that one of your hyperlinked information websites recognizes your stock symbol, while another one of your hyperlinked information sources does not recognize your stock symbol.  Fortunately, this is rare and you can usually recover by manually correcting the unrecognized symbol.

For example, let’s say you have entered symbol “RDS-A” (Royal Dutch Shell – A Shares) on one of your datasheets.  When ‘Yahoo Finance’ is selected as your active hyperlink, your ‘Royal Dutch Shell’ hyperlink works (you click on the RDS-A stock name and your hyperlink opens to the Yahoo Finance RDS-A page).  However, when you change your active hyperlink to ‘Zacks’ and click on your RDS-A hyperlink, the Zacks website doesn’t recognize ‘RDS-A.’  This is because Zacks’ notation for the class A shares is ‘RDS.A,’ not ‘RDS-A.’  You can easily navigate to the correct Zacks’ page by typing RDS.A in their symbol look-up textbox.

Fortunately, this is a rare condition that won’t affect many of your stocks.  Once you know how to manually recover from this rare condition, you’ll find that the productivity gains realized by the custom hyperlink functionality far outweigh the limitations of a few unrecognized symbols.