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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

For $F to stop selling trucks in North America would be financial suicide. They sell on average an F series every 30 seconds. F series numbers for 2018 are trending up, with this March being the largest March month they've had in five years[1]. Not to mention, trucks are really expensive. A nice loaded F-150 can easily cost $40k and above.

[1] http://fordauthority.com/fmc/ford-motor-company-sales-number...

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They are not. F150, SUVs, Crossovers still selling. Headline was a bit off

Yes, I was making the point they would not stop selling trucks. Typical TechCrunch writing misleading headlines to get clicks.

Disagree. People who drive trucks do not consider them a subset of cars. That's why it's the automotive industry not the car industry.

This. Automotive industry media in general had me confused with the terms. "SUVs" are absolutely cars. Most utility vehicles are cars. Even "passenger cars".

Dumb terminology but TC is perfectly in line with the industry.

Not just them but my buddy calls his Jeep SUV a "truck". Some of this is history. I have an original Jeep Cherokee which is built on a truck platform. His is a Grand, which is built on a car platform. I'm always like, yours is a car, mine's a truck. Then I realize this is dumb to argue about. Just a bad headline.

The original Cherokee is unibody, just like the Grand Cherokees have always been. What truck body is your Cherokee built on?

It depends on the SUV in question. Old school body on frame SUVs are most definitely trucks. The jacked up cars with extra head room (Ford Kuga/Escape) are not. The only reason why those things are considered trucks at all is to game the CAFE emissions requirements.

Why do you call them $F?

Ticker symbol.

It's just 'F' isn't it? Why add a dollar? And why not just more simply write 'Ford'?

'Cause you gotta be trendy, like referring to cities by their airport code.

Actually the $ helps with search engines and actually helps to indicate to me that the author meant a stock symbol instead of a bunch of random letters.

> actually helps to indicate to me that the author meant a stock symbol instead of a bunch of random letters

Which really just takes us back to... why not just write 'Ford'?

Yeah but F, o, r and d are pretty random.

Because people think by referring to a company by its ticker symbol makes them seem like they are more of an expert.

Or, it allows you to type faster and hyperlink on $TWTR.

Well if you where an employee of a listed company and did not know your employers SEDOL (or eqvielent) id start to question your commitment :-)

I have had a job where I quickly scanned the FT copy on reception as a regular thing - just in case they had brought another acquisition and our team (in house consultancy) needed to get involved with them.

I actually did work for Ford for a few years in the 90s, and I still would never refer to the company by its ticker symbol. That's just stupid.

$GOOG will show the stock info immediatelly if you searched that.

I mean, so does searching GOOG - https://www.google.com/search?q=GOOG

...or F - https://www.google.com/search?q=F

The latter certainly depends on Google's algorithms. For me, Ford stock is nowhere to be seen (unlike with "$F", for which it is shown).

You might be right.

A surefire way to get the chart is specifiying exchange and ticker, for example: nyse:crm

"F" is their ticker symbol, and $SYMBOL is commonly used to denote that SYMBOL refers to a stock.

Additionally, it usually carries the context of specifically referring to Ford stock rather than Ford the corporate entity in general.

I can't speak for nodesocket, but I noticed the $SYMBOL convention become popular to denote a ticker symbol when Twitter started treating $SYMBOL as a hashtag (often called a "cashtag") a few years ago.

https://twitter.com/twitter/status/230098997010911233

Like most twitter innovations, this convention started years before that. I noticed it with stocktwits.

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