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