why is the NASDAQ Composite's symbol IXIC? What does it stand for? Index something?

Answer 1

The symbol for many indexes varies by the service/site that you're using to reference it. Many actually use $COMPQ as the symbol for the Nasdaq composite.

However, Yahoo does use the symbol you mention and it doesn't really stand for anything. It's just the symbol they use so you can reference the index on their site.

Wish I had a better story, but that's about it!

Here's the link to your index!
http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=%5EIXIC

Hope that helps!