Size of "Universe"

DoctorT

Hi!

To find out the size of the "universe" (i.e. the total number of stocks and ETFs), I, just now, ran a scan with the following filters:

[TYPE IS STOCK] AND [OPTIONABLE IS TRUE]

The scan yielded only 999 matches. What am I doing wrong?

Thank you!

Dr. T

markd

999 is the limit on the number of symbols the scan engine will return.

Limiting the amount of data a query can return is a common (IT) industry practice for large databases. Very large query answers can slow down database performance considerably.

As a side note, I think the term "universe" is meant to denote the set of symbols that have a selection of properties you specify, i.e., the ones your are interested in trading - e.g small cap technology that pay a dividend and are optionable. It doesn't really mean the complete set of symbols available.

If you really want to know the total number of stocks in the database, you could probably do it by specifying each industry (e.g. [group is ComputerHardware]) and adding up the totals, since there is probably not an industry that exceeds the answer limit. If there were, you could break it up by market cap. I believe there are 105 industries at the moment. However, any number you come up with would not be static, as issues are listed and de-listed and companies merge and spin off pretty frequently.