“Measuring the effects of the fluency of company names and tickers on the stock returns”

Abstract

Previous research in behavioral finance field shows that the fluency effect exists. In my thesis, I determine whether name and ticker fluency affect stock returns in any way. I find that stocks with fluent names and tickers do not yield higher abnormal returns relative to nonfluent stocks. I show that neither the name, nor the ticker fluency effect influences the stock returns significantly in the long run. Moreover, I show that after controlling for a large vector of company characteristics, as well as firm and time effects, the joint influence of name and ticker fluency on stock returns is statistically not significant. The presented results imply that investors are not able to exploit the fluency effect on stock returns. Furthermore, using event study analysis, I determine that a change of a company ticker to a more fluent one affects both the biggest and medium-sized companies’ stock abnormal returns positively in the short and the long run, leading to significant outperformance compared with the stocks that lowered their fluency levels when Carhart Four Factors and several firm and event characteristics are controlled for.