As most of us know by now, Tesla, the electric car company, just released news related to its latest roadster and self-driving truck. Exciting stuff!

This also happened with a public company that had the symbol ‘NEST’, when Google announced they were purchasing Nest, the thermostat company, a public company with the same ticker symbol ran up over 1900% [link]

This time its happening with cryptocurrencies. Case and point, TESLA. Here are the charts to prove it [link].

According to an article in the New Yorker titled ‘The Secret Science of Stock Symbols’ it reads in part: “Why do investors, many of whom painstakingly dissect reams of data to understand companies’ finances, also base their decisions in part on a stock’s ticker symbol? The answer is that reading pronounceable ticker symbols is slightly less mentally taxing; people generally prefer objects and events that are more “cognitively fluent,” or easier to process. The same logic explains why we tend to prefer people with simpler names, and why the aphorism “caution and measure win you treasure” seems truer than “caution and measure win you riches.” In each case, the more fluent concept seems more familiar, less risky, less threatening, and more trustworthy — and the same is true of stocks and, more broadly, of economic decisions. Few investors admit to choosing a stock based on its name; biases like these are powerful precisely because they operate below the surface of conscious awareness.

A similar effect explains why some forms of currency seem more valuable than others. In one experiment, we approached dozens of adults and asked them to estimate what they could buy with one dollar: how many thumbtacks, or pieces of Skittles candies, or sheets of wrapping paper, or paper clips. They wrote their responses on a sheet of paper that included the photocopied image of either a common dollar bill or a relatively rare dollar coin. Like companies with complex names, rarer currency instruments are more “disfluent” because they’re unfamiliar. Those who responded while looking at the dollar bill believed they could buy an average of eighteen per cent more of the items than those who were looking at the dollar coin. We also found a strong relationship between how many times people had seen the dollar coin and how much they believed it could purchase — the more familiar the coin, the more valuable it seemed.”

Here’s another interactive chart [link] that provides some interesting insight into this phenomenon. In addition, it’s also very interesting to note that the symbol ‘TESLA’ first appeared trending on one of the only sites to capture this kind of data located here [link].

Could this be a trading strategy some traders are well aware of while others are not? If this is the case, it’s well worth investigating as these kinds of profits are hard to ignore!