Traders can earn a significant amount of money by making a trade before other traders, but sometimes the computer doesn’t identify the correct stock to trade. “The computers look for any movement in a stock,” says Nikiforov, “and they try to jump as early as possible.” These automated programs scan newswires and social media sites looking for market-changing news about companies and then automatically trade stocks and options based on that information. Nikiforov says over the last 10 years, 70% of all institutional trading has been done by computers. It’s not only humans who are confused by similar names. “Sometimes, one company’s name is another company’s ticker symbol.” For example, Ford Motor Company’s ticker symbol is just one letter, “F.” A company named Forward Industries, which has nothing to do with manufacturing cars, has the ticker symbol “FORD.” “We concentrated on very specific categories where confusion happens,” says Nikiforov. In their research article, “ How Much Do Investors Trade Because of Name/Ticker Confusion?,” the Rutgers–Camden scholars found that 55% of firms in the United States share at least some meaningful part of their name and ticker symbol with another U.S. Hearing about what happened with Twitter inspired Balashov and Nikiforov to explore how many companies have similar names or ticker symbols. After Twitter announced plans for its initial public offering in 2013, the stock of a long-closed electronics retailer, Tweeter Home Entertainment Group, skyrocketed 1,800% because investors had mistaken the company for Twitter, the microblogging and social networking platform.
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