MAANG? MANGA? Or MAMATA?
Facebook’s rebranding to Meta Platforms has launched a search for a new name for the high-flying FAANG group that also includes Apple , Amazon , Netflix and Alphabet .
Facebook on Thursday announced it is now called Meta Platforms as the social media company shifts to building the ambitious “metaverse,” a shared virtual environment. The name change comes after a damaging whistleblower report and criticism from lawmakers and regulators over its market power.
The most popular suggestion on Twitter for the tech-related heavyweight group was MAANG – where FAANG’s “F” is replaced with “M.” Some users also rearranged the letters to MANGA, referring to Japanese comic books.
The elite FAANG stocks have a combined market capitalization of about $7.416 trillion so far this year, up from about $5.8 trillion last year.
Several Twitter users also proposed to reshuffle the group to add Microsoft Corp – which is competing with Apple for the most valuable U.S.-listed company – as well as Tesla Inc , which joined the elite trillion-dollar market value club just this week.
With the reshuffle, some users came up with MAMATA – that would drop Netflix, which has the smallest market cap compared with the rest of the group at $299 billion, and use an “A” for Alphabet, whose search engine Google gave the FAANGs their “G.”
MAMATA – consisting of Microsoft, Apple, Meta, Amazon, Tesla and Alphabet – have a combined market cap of about $10 trillion. They make up a quarter of the S&P 500′s weight, compared with the legacy FAANG group’s nearly 20%.
“These handful of stocks (FAANG) have reigned for quite some time, and it may be with the beginning of taper, rates slowly rising and inflation … that these tech long duration assets may become less valuable,” said Tom Hayes, managing member at Great Hill Capital in New York.
Shares of Meta Platforms rose about 2% in early trading and will get a new ticker, MVRS, on Dec. 1.
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