Scott Matthewman

Via John Gruber, it emerges that Sun Microsystems is going to change its stock ticker symbol from SUNW to JAVA.

Now, the four-letter stock symbol is predominantly a Wall Street thing, although many (if not all?) London stocks have a similar alphanumeric code that can be used in US-based portfolio checkers (the London stocks ending with a ‘.L’). But I’m not sure if this is a standard reference for those stocks. Back in the days when I was working with stock information every day at Financial Times Information (publishing the Daily Official List, as well as generating shares information pages for the Daily Mail and the Express), it was the SEDOL number that was important, and beyond that people used the full stock name or abbreviations thereof.

So, as a Brit, the merits of changing a stock symbol as a means of enforcing a company’s brand may be somewhat lost on me.

I do have some additional experience on this front, though. I was still working at the (now defunct) UK office of PlanetOut, Inc. when the company decided to list. My memory’s a bit hazy on the timeline, but as I recall I was on the verge of leaving the company and the terms of my severance package were still under discussion. So, at the conference call to discuss details of the IPO I was (for once) not about to rock the boat by stating my mind.

Over that conference call, the then CEO explained that the company’s stock ticker was going to be LGBT — which also stands for ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered’, an attempt at all-inclusiveness that theoretically described the company’s target audience, although for as long as I worked there it was all about the G; lip service was paid to Ls, while the Bs and the Ts were pretty much left to fend for themselves.

I do remember everybody in America presenting the ticker announcement as being the most exciting thing — but over the phone, everybody in the UK was inidfferent. Branding by ticker is obviously directed towards a small section of the US business community — but I suspect it goes down better in the boardrooms of the companies who like to think they’re making a good decision than it does on the markets’ trading floors.

For the brokers, a more pertinent question than “what four letters does this ticker symbol consist of” is “how does this company make money”. In the case of PlanetOut, the answer was (and still is) “it doesn’t”. I can’t help feeling that having business people being more excited about their ticker symbol than making their company profitable may have been a big part of the problem.

And that’s what worries me about Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s enthusiasm for the change of his company’s ticker symbol.