No laughing matter: A stock with LMFO symbol to hit Nasdaq soon
LMF Acquisition Opportunities, a special purpose acquisition company, will trade under the symbol LMFO, a slang for Laughing my Face Off. January 15, 2021 / 01:04 PM IST
LMF Acquisition Opportunities (LMFAO), a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC), last week filed to raise $75 million in an IPO on Nasdaq. In its prospectus, the company said that following its listing, its Class A share will trade under the symbol LMFO. LMFO is a widely used slang and acronym for Laughing My Face Off.
In a recent report,
Quartz highlighted that Nasdaq has a penchant for novelty symbols. On its website, the exchange has even listed its 10 favourites. Among the popular ones are Asian Tigers Fund’s GRR and Franklin Resources’ BEN.
January 14, 2021
The prospectus held no punch line. But the company was LMAO all the same.
On Friday, LMF Acquisition Opportunities filed to raise $75 million in an IPO on Nasdaq. Its Class A shares, the prospectus proposed, would trade under the symbol LMAO. With an equally straight face, the prospectus named the sponsor company: LMFAO Sponsor, based out of Florida.
These companies are affiliated to LM Funding America, a 12-year-old financial services firm that manages the collection process for delinquent home debt. After the filing, shares in LM Funding America rose 160% on Nasdaq.
Novelty stock symbols aren’t new. Nasdaq, in fact, has its own web page listing its 10 favorites among them, the Asian Tigers Fund’s GRR and Franklin Resources’ BEN. “When I was at the Securities and Exchange Commission, there were a few marijuana-related penny stocks with clever symbols,” Joshua White, a one-time financial economist at the SEC and now an assistant professor at Vanderbilt