Ticker Symbol

Oscar Wilde joked that a cynic “knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” Under that definition, the stock market is always cynical, but by the late 1990s it would have shocked Oscar himself. A single half baked opinion on price could double a company’s stock even as its value went entirely unexamined. In late 1998, Henry Blodget, an analyst at CIBC Oppenheimer, warned that “as with all Internet stocks, a valuation is clearly more art than science.” Then, citing only the possibility of future growth, he jacked up his “price target” on 40 Commentary on Chapter

Just 12 months later, Juno’s shares had shriveled to $1.093.

A ticker symbol is an abbreviation, usually one to four letters long, of a company’s name used as shorthand to identify a stock for trading purposes.

This was not an isolated incident; on at least three other occasions in the late 1990s, day traders sent the wrong stock soaring when they mistook its ticker symbol for that of a newly minted Internet company.Amazon.com from $150 to $400 in one fell swoop. Amazon.com shot up 19% that day and-despite Blodget’s protest that his price target was a one year forecast-soared past $400 in just three weeks. A year later, PaineWebber analyst Walter Piecyk predicted that Qualcomm stock would hit $1,000 a share over the next 12 months. The stock- already up 1,842% that year-soared another 31% that day, hitting $659 a share.