Everyone knows that a fool and his money are soon parted, but it turns out also that a tongue-tied fool and his money are parted even faster.
So say researchers at Princeton, who claim to have found a correlation between the ease of pronouncing company names and corresponding stock ticker symbols and how those companies perform in their initial public offerings. The easy ones such as Google, Inc./Goog tend to fare much better than do the more challenging ones such as Vyyo, Inc./VYYO.
Or think of it this way: Perhaps had the Vonage ticker symbol been VON instead of VG the company wouldn’t be in a position right now of having to promise bankers that it will buy back its unwanted stock.
“This research shows that people take mental shortcuts, even when it comes to their investments, when it would seem that they would want to be most rational,” said Danny Oppenheimer, assistant professor of psychology at Princeton.
Another way to phrase that is that people are fools.
