Logology
Inside the Strange, Unlikely Battle for Clever Ticker Symbols
Startups like Slack have gone public with the cutesy tickers. Do investors care?
For a brief moment last February, a tiny Vancouver-based cannabis company was on top of the world. Weekend Unlimited, a self-described “premium” hemp brand that employs roughly a dozen people, had just won rights to one of the most coveted ticker symbols in Canadian history: POT. The day it debuted its new symbol, shares of the company — which had been public for less than four months — leaped by nearly 120%.
Canada had legalized marijuana just months prior, and the timing turned out to be serendipitous. Just as marijuana brands were rolling out their pitches to investors, fertilizer company PotashCorp abandoned its POT symbol. In response, a frenzy ensued. Nearly 40 companies requested the symbol, a level of interest so overwhelming that in January 2019, in an unprecedented move, a group of Canadian stock exchanges elected to hold a random lottery to assign POT. Weekend Unlimited — which had previously traded under the unfortunate ticker YOLO — walked away the victor.
Anyone who has followed the recent spate of IPOs may have noticed that ticker symbols — the one-to-five-letter strings that represent a company’s stock…
