‘Meta’morphosis leaves FAANG in a flux

Facebook Inc. is beginning an identity overhaul to better reflect where it wants to go beyond its namesake social-media platform.

Starting December 1, Facebook will become Meta Platforms Inc., and its famous stock ticker symbol, FB, will switch to MVRS, a play on the Metaverse.

In another corner of the social-media arena, Twitter users, who prefer to rely on finances, mourned the possible end of FAANG—the business for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and a bunch of tickers from Google parent Alphabet. short name.

One user tweeted, “Wait – does this mean we have to start saying MAANG instead of FAANG now?”

Corporate name changes occur fairly frequently after a merger, and they are at the forefront of the playbook for businesses looking for an identity change.

In 2003 Philip Morris renamed itself Altria to distance itself from its tobacco operations.

Google adopted Alphabet in 2015 as it went far beyond its search business.

Companies are heavily tied to the all-caps monikers used by investors to find and trade their shares.

Altria continues to use its MO ticker today. And Alphabet still goes by GOOGL, helping to explain why FAANG didn’t turn into FAANA after the search giant was reorganized and renamed.

There’s a possible reason for the decision to stick with those old tickers. Researchers have found some correlation over the years between a stock’s value and the “probability” or even the pronounced ability of a ticker symbol.

A study in 2016 found that tickers such as AAPL (Apple Inc.) and IBM (International Business Machines Corp.) scored higher with investors, while more tangent symbols such as JWN (Nordstrom Inc.) declined.

In 2009 researchers found that the clever ticker is the next best thing. Symbols, including the LUV of Southwest Airlines Company, show that a company is creative, even fun.

Both studies ended before the introduction of Facebook, so there does not appear to be immediate data on the possibility of FB.