In a highly anticipated move, Facebook, Inc. FB announced its new name and a new stock symbol Thursday at its Facebook Connect event. The new stock ticker and name could change one of the most well-known investing acronyms of big tech stocks.
What Happened: The acronym FAANG was coined by Jim Cramer in 2013 as a basket of some of the largest technology stocks.
Included in FAANG are: Facebook, Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN, Apple Inc AAPL, Netflix Inc NFLX and Alphabet Inc GOOGGOOGL.
Related Link: Facebook Rebrands As Meta: What Investors Should Know About New Name, Ticker And Vision
Cramer said the acronym and list of stocks was created to cover companies that were “constantly reinventing themselves."
Facebook announced a rebrand to Meta, as it goes all-in on the metaverse and invests heavily in augmented reality and virtual reality.
Facebook will change its stock symbol to MVRS as part of the name change. Google made a similar change in 2015 to the new name Alphabet for the parent company. With two of the letters in FAANG now changed, Cramer announced a new acronym.
The new acronym is MAMAA, consisting of Meta (Facebook), Apple, Microsoft Corporation MSFT, Amazon and Alphabet.
Cramer said the companies in the basket are all “poised for long-term success.”
“In the future, we’re going to experience the internet in 3D and Facebook’s commitment to virtual and augmented reality will make it an integral player of the metaverse, just as it is an integral player on social media,” Cramer said of Facebook’s new name and strategy.
Cramer announced the new acronym on the Thursday episode of “Mad Money,” which airs on CNBC.
Why It’s Important: The acronyms FANG and FAANG have been widely used by the investing community to represent some of the largest technology growth stocks.
Among the notable changes to Cramer’s new acronym are the removal of Netflix and the addition of Microsoft. Netflix has a market cap of around $300 million, significantly lower than the rest of the group, which could be the reason for the change, along with slowing growth.
Microsoft overtook Apple this week as the top publicly-traded company in the world by market cap at $2.45 trillion.
A look at the market cap leaderboard on Assetdash.com shows Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet and Amazon as the top public U.S. companies. Trading ahead of Facebook is electric vehicle company Tesla Inc TSLA.
That begs the question of whether Tesla should be included in the acronym of high-growth, tech-related stocks.
“And you could argue that Tesla should be part of the acronym conversation, especially now that its market cap has surpassed $1 trillion,” The Verge said in a recent article.
The Verge highlighted the omission of Microsoft given its cap and the need to change given the new tickers and names for Google and Facebook.
The Verge played around with acronyms with the companies Apple, Amazon, Alphabet (or Google), Meta, Microsoft, Netflix and Tesla (A, A, A/G, M, M, N, T).
Among the acronyms listed by The Verge were GAMMA, MAMAA, MANTA and A MANTA.
FB Price Action: Facebook shares are up 2.63% to $325.25 on Friday morning at publication.
Photo by bruce mars on Unsplash
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