How it works...

Now that we've taken an initial glance at the data, it's important to take some time out to identify the fields that will be most important to us, and understand what these fields mean.

The first few fields contain identifying information about the company.

The ticker (sometimes also called the symbol) is the identifier for the stock of a company. No two companies will have the exact same ticker symbol. So AA is always Alcoa, AAPL is always Apple, and so forth.

Next, we have the company name, sector, industry, and home country of the company. The sector and industry details serve as ways to classify stocks to inform us of each company's primary line of business; sector is more general (higher level), and industry is more specific (lower level). For example, Apple Inc. (AAPL) is in the Consumer Goods sector and primarily produces consumer goods in the Electronic Equipment industry.