Use ld.charAt(0). It will return the first char of the String.
With ld.substring(0, 1), you can get the first character as String.
String has a charAt method that returns the character at the specified position. Like arrays and Lists, String is 0-indexed, i.e. the first character is at index 0 and the last character is at index length() – 1.
So, assuming getSymbol() returns a String, to print the first character, you could do:
System.out.println(ld.getSymbol().charAt(0)); // char at index 0