Today, Google announced the details of their upcoming IPO. The company plans to trade under the symbol GOOG, which isn't quite what SC would have guessed (his money, metaphorically speaking, was on GOGL -- at the proposed initial valuation, nearly as big as Yahoo or Amazon to start, his actual money won't be anywhere near this one). Since this is something of an event, here's a little riff on stock symbols and their communicative functions.
There's informational value in the length of the symbol alone. A New York Stock Exchange-listed company, whether foreign or domestic, can use a symbol of anywhere between one and three letters. Surprisingly, not all of the one-letter symbols are taken: H, I, J, M, P, U, W, and Z are all available. Admittedly, there aren't likely to be quite so many takers for Z as any of the others, and it's an open secret that the NYSE has been trying for years to get Intel and Microsoft to take two of them (SC will trust you to figure out which two), but this is still an interesting demonstration of the fact that being short isn't the only criteria of a symbol's desirability. Any symbol which is four letters represents a company which trades on the NASDAQ; any symbol of five letters not only means that the stock trades on the NASDAQ, but depending on the specific fifth letter, may either be a foreign listing or a special circumstance. One example of an circumstance that isn't a big deal is the dual listing of Comcast shares as CMCSA and CMCSK; the fifth symbol in these cases denotes voting and non-voting shares respectively. A symbol like SOLUQ.OB is one to avoid; not only could the company cease trading at any time, since they're bankrupt (indicated by the Q), but the OB tells you that the company's stock is trading in a market known as the "bulletin board", where the rules are rather less stringent than they are on the NYSE or NASDAQ.
Aside from the length, the symbol can tell you something about the company's name, by being an abbreviation. CSCO (Cisco) and MSFT (Microsoft) are well-known examples of that style. Or it can tell you something about the company's products; Anheuser-Busch, brewer of Budweiser, trades under BUD, while Starwood Resorts, owner of Sheraton Hotels, trades under HOT (as in hotel). Some companies have a bit of a sense of humor about it; Brinker, a Texas-based casual dining operation, is listead as EAT, and Southwest Airlines trades under the symbol LUV.
Some companies know that their symbol is associated with a poor public image, but because they've got a heavy investment in the symbol, they can't change; MO, long known to the rest of us as Philip Morris, today is the symbol for "Altria", a disastrous idea for a loosely Latinate name (see if you believe their story about the derivation). Other companies never quite got the bad karma associated with their symbol, and aren't around to worry about it anymore; the now-defunct Bethlehem Steel was a notable example.
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