America Risks Running Out of Tickers for Single-Stock ETFs (yahoo.com) 40
U.S. exchanges' four-character limit for ETF tickers is creating fierce competition in the $10 trillion industry, particularly for single-stock funds. With 456,976 possible combinations, options narrow drastically when built around existing company tickers. MicroStrategy-inspired ETFs, for instance, leave issuers with just 52 choices using 'MST'. Memorable tickers are crucial for differentiation and can improve stock liquidity.
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That's all
Actually, never mind, abolish the stock market.
I guess you own a lot of surplus Neanderthal-era caves (already furnished with "art") that you want to rent out ... along with expensive leases for grazing property where fruits & berries & veggies can be gathered by hand? /s
Coming soon: EEETFTFTFs! (Score:5, Interesting)
"America Risks Running Out of Tickers for Single-Stock ETFs".
Let me preface this by specifying that I don't actually want to know the answer to this question, because I couldn't possibly hate finance more, but: What is the point of an "exchange-traded fund" that tracks a single stock? Isn't that the same thing as buying the stock?
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Re:Coming soon: EEETFTFTFs! (Score:5, Informative)
No the funds typically are leveraged and may even be inverse leveraged. You don't buy a single-stock ETF if you want to bet on the underlying value of a company, you buy it if you want to bet a multiple of the underlying value.
E.g. take Random Inc. their stock price RND = $100. Let's assume there's an ETF called RNDM that is inverse leveraged by a factor of 2. You put $100 into that fund. Tomorrow RND stock increases by 10%, you now only have $80 left. The fund provided you a way of short selling without engaging in a short selling contract. Likewise if you think RND stock may actually increase by 20% tomorrow because of a cool earning and you find an ETF called RNDB that is 2x positively leveraged, if that price goes up 20% your value goes up 40%.
It's a way of multiplying profits, and along with it losses and risk. They are usually very short term speculative funds, not the kind you buy and hold on to.
Another dumb fucking idea brought to you from the world of finance.
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So who is the other side of this??? in a stock purchase you buy, they get cash and walk away, so for you to sell the same thing happens. in an ETF - if you want to leave the fund manager pays you out and then turns around and sells the same stock equivalent.
if it's inverse leveraged 2x.... there has to be someone on the other side willing to pay out on your buy.... So it sounds like a bloody bookie/casino vs. owning portions of a company.....
Re:Coming soon: EEETFTFTFs! (Score:5, Interesting)
The exchange-traded fund is borrowing money and using that to leverage the short, either by doubling up on trades or something similar synthetically with options contracts. Either way, they have negative carry, because they involve leverage there is a cost of doing business that is a negative on every day you hold that asset.
There are few cases where you'd want to use these over doing the same action yourself, and usually the reason people use them is because they're not allowed for whatever reason to do the direct action themselves. Ultimately, steer clear of them unless you know what you're doing, and if you know what you're doing you don't need my advice.
Re:Coming soon: EEETFTFTFs! (Score:5, Interesting)
One of the benefits of them is you can trade them after hours, which you cannot do with options. This lets you game after-hours news.
But for most people they are a terrible idea to play with as you and GGP point out. I used to trade triple-short and triple-long oil ETFs when they were very high volatility back around 2002. It was a good way to make some money on small moves playing the channels. I wouldn't touch them today though; the algorithms have too much of an advantage.
Re:Coming soon: EEETFTFTFs! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes there is someone on the other side, just not the company. Most of the finance world is very much a casino / bookie. People are betting with each other as to what will happen. The entire concept of short selling works like this too. You can't short a stock against the company - what company would bet against themselves at the expense of shareholders? You bet against someone else who will take your bet.
The same applies to these leveraged funds. The sources of the funding comes from someone betting against you.
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"Single-stock ETFs are designed for traders who wish to speculate on the outcome of a single company's short-term price movements." In short, they are an easy, one-click way buy stocks in a leveraged way that creates higher gains (and losses) than buying the stock directly. I wouldn't touch them with a 10 foot pole.
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TickerV6 (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry, as people adopt TickerV6 everything will work itself out.
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I'm sure someone will "ticker-squat" and buy up all the remaining 4 letter tickers.
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Don't worry, as people adopt TickerV6 everything will work itself out.
30 years later: "Slashdot - Why won't people adopt TickerV6?"
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30 years later: "Slashdot - Why won't people adopt TickerV6?"
I blame their use of hexadecimal digits.
Easy! (Score:1)
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peach peach peach is happy to take your money
Re:Easy fix: Use emojis. (Score:2)
Don't laugh. I once worked for a company who rented their software rather than buy. The database used a 2-character product code, as it was designed for domains that had relatively few products.
But the marketers wanted to keep track of which ad campaign a purchase was tied to, not just the product ID. However, the software didn't have that feature, so they came up with a character set for each campaign. But after a while they ran out of "normal" characters and used up just about every character in the keybo
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Do what other services do (Score:2)
Do what other services do and tack on a random number at the end. Sure it is stupid, just like everywhere else that uses that method, but it *is* a solution
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That will add 10 ticker symbols. What part of "Four Character Limit" are you having a problem with.
Install ETF trade32 (Score:2)
Install ETF trade32
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Install ETF trade32
How about upgrade to 'trade64' with backwards support for 'trade32' ?
SEC approves too many junk ETFs w low liquidity (Score:2)
There are just too many ETFs that trade with no volume which has no reason to exist. Just like penny stocks with too low a price, some of these ETFs should be delisted when they can't trade with any liquidity.
They could also start adding lower case significance to the last few letters, such AAzz which would be different from AAZZ. This would increase the combination to about 2 million four letter ETFs, which is a ridiculous number to follow.
Rename MST (Score:2)
Stock market gambling (Score:3)
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The stock market is ever more disconnected from the underlying value of the companies. It promotes ever more outright gambling. This is not a good thing.
It seems inevitable that without some form of governance or forced restraint, that this would be the result of the stock market. Once it started allowing futures markets and pure speculative trading on imagined scenarios, it's only a matter of time before the fantasy subsumes the entire beast. When will it stop? When we have another full-fledged depression and the people playing the big money games lose their value. So long as it only fucks with the little guy and steals pensions from grandma, it's fine. It
Emoji To The Rescue! (Score:2)
Sounds like a great place to use the wonderful emoji characters which have infected so many other things where actual letters should be used.
Because who doesn't know how to pronounce a string of ambiguous images.
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Brave of you to assume they support Unicode when they say character, and not only ASCII.
ROFL, HAHA! (Score:2)
Even that one is free!
Just allow number to be used to create another million new combinations.
Why is there a character limit? (Score:2)
Isn't the 4-character limit a legacy of physical ticker tape? Why do we need character limits now? There's no technological reason. It's purely historical.
So, why not just let the limit be something huge, like 1k? Companies will naturally pick names/symbols that are memorable and not too long. The market would still have to approve names to avoid trademark issues. The only limitation I would keep is case-insensitive letters from the 26-letter English alphabet, at least for US-based stock markets. Of
So many levels of dumb (Score:2)
This is so many levels of dumb...
1 - Introducing artificial scarcity so something worthless can maybe be sold for lots of money. Oh, you want to buy SDOT? Let's talk...
2 - Creating single-stock ETFs. All the advantages and disadvantages of owning the stock itself, but with a lot more risk.
3 - Imagining that calling something MSTX rather than WOMP or PLKU makes any difference whatsoever.
I buy boring, low-fee index funds and hold them for a long time. Whatever the market does, they do, and in the lo
why just 26 letters (Score:2)
First world problem (Score:2)
Talk about the ultimate first world problem right there!