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Comment by chrisseaton | Hacker News Reader

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

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