Facebook’s rebranding to Meta includes a change to the company’s stock symbol. Facebook shares, currently traded under the ticker FB, will start trading under the ticker MVRS as of Dec. 1, the company said.
The change from FB (which rose 1.5% on the rebranding news to $316.92) to MVRS may confuse investors in the short run, but the new ticker will have less in common with other stock symbols, which may help out traders in the long run.
Symbol changes are common, but there’s nothing written into the rules that says a company rebrand requires it to also change its ticker symbol. (Google kept GOOG and GOOGL even after it changed its name to Alphabet.)
Sometimes novel ticker symbols are a gimmick to attract investor interest (like LMAO) but other times they can actually help avoid investor confusion, like when furniture maker Ethan Allen Interiors (formerly ETH) didn’t want to be mistaken for ethereum and changed its ticker to ETD.
A distinctive ticker symbol matters not just for branding, but because similarities between symbols occasionally cause investors to pour into the wrong stock, a 2019 study by Rutgers University‒Camden researchers found. On Nasdaq there are currently eight ticker symbols that have the letters F and B in them. Only four ticker symbols have M and V and no ticker symbols have M, V, and R.