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America Risks Running Out of Tickers for Single-Stock ETFs
Hoarding and stockpiling tickers, proliferating leveraged single-stock ETFs, 'fierce' competition .... what could go wrong for the Average Investor here?
Reminds me of the 'gold rush' companies used to do when reserving domain names for products/services ... they'd buy them in a ton of countries/TLDs and various permutations of them to protect against typosquatting. Now many will also buy "--sucks" names to try and minimize legally-protected satire or protests for their products.
It becomes a mania for companies, trust me ... I worked at the center of all that back during Dot Com.
Only the current rules for single stock eTF tickers are too restrictive.
Reserving tickers shouldn't be free, but should have some nominal cost. Also, copycat tickers shouldn't be allowed - those reserved by others that are similar to existing company names/tickers.
Look at how the ADRs are named. The ADR tickers may have identifiable letters, or not. They end in Y or F.
So, single stock ETFs can just end in S.
Many foreign tickers are all numbers (Japan, S Korea, HK), so a mix of letters and numbers can be used.
All mutual funds have 5-letter tickers that end in X.
There are also thousands of Nasdaq/NFN tickers for funds that don't trade - VAs, etc. Nasdaq charges a small fee for those. These 6-letter tickers start with Q and end in X, e.g. QzzzzX. MFOP now recognizes several.
Comments
Boy Howdy. I thought I was fairly up date on market offerings bot those are new things for me. And btw, no thanks.
apollo-funds-to-take-aerospace-parts-maker-barnes-group-private
It becomes a mania for companies, trust me ... I worked at the center of all that back during Dot Com.
Only the current rules for single stock eTF tickers are too restrictive.
Reserving tickers shouldn't be free, but should have some nominal cost. Also, copycat tickers shouldn't be allowed - those reserved by others that are similar to existing company names/tickers.
Look at how the ADRs are named. The ADR tickers may have identifiable letters, or not. They end in Y or F.
So, single stock ETFs can just end in S.
Many foreign tickers are all numbers (Japan, S Korea, HK), so a mix of letters and numbers can be used.
All mutual funds have 5-letter tickers that end in X.
There are also thousands of Nasdaq/NFN tickers for funds that don't trade - VAs, etc. Nasdaq charges a small fee for those. These 6-letter tickers start with Q and end in X, e.g. QzzzzX. MFOP now recognizes several.
PS - I’ve checked and found these not being used.