What should I name my company?
If you’ve been around any old school SEO advice it included naming your company something with the letter A. That’s because just like the “Yellow Pages”, lists of things on the internet were always alphabetical.
Obviously things have gotten better. You don’t have to just pick A-names for your company because the internet is so much more sophisticated now. We have all these algorithms and all this AI research. Right?
No. Not just one, but two papers from independent research teams have just found that stock trading is heavily biased by a company’s name. Since stocks are generally listed alphabetically, folks pick stocks earlier in the list rather than giving equal opportunity to discovery.
We find that early alphabet stocks are traded more frequently than later alphabet stocks and that alphabeticity also affects firm value.
Even more striking is that this effect has gotten worse...