A stock symbol or ticker symbol is a short abbreviation used to uniquely identify publicly traded shares of a particular stock on an exchange. A stock symbol may consist of letters, numbers or a combination of both. Today, tickers are registered with the SEC and are used by primarily public companies. Our Securities and Exchange SEC commission continues to fail in its ability to regulate the financial industry and doesn't have enough resources to do for the thousands of public and hundreds of thousands of private companies. One way to help provide transparency is to help make information more transparent for private companies so the bar isn't so high for investor liquidity and we see more IPO's. Here is one company that has a long term solution to that problem.
Manhattan Beach-based CapLinked.com the development of software as a service tool for managing venture and angel fundraising run by Eric M. Jackson, reported Tuesday that it has started allowing companies to register unique "ticker symbols" on its site. The firm said that the symbols, which will be unique to private companies, can be used to identify companies on websites, in tweets, and also on such sites as SecondMarket and Stocktwits.
Previously, unique ticker symbols have been reserved for publicly-traded securities and traders tag the tickers using a $AAPL symbol in Tweets. CapLinked is seeking to make tickers something that is also typical in the world of private investing. Private companies will benefit from a unique ticker for use in branding, social media, and investor relations.
Companies signing up for CapLinked’s free service also will be able to register a unique ticker symbol that could potentially be used on SecondMarket and Stocktwits since our system is based on their models. Caplinked's goal is to take SecondMarket’s concept, formalize it, and create a ticker system that is universally accepted by the thousands of private companies and startups that register with Caplinked.
CapLinked gives private companies the tools they need to attract investment, share documents, and act like a typical CRM Salesforece.com system would for sales. Caplinked companies will grow large enough to be traded on SecondMarket eventually and possibly take their CapLinked ticker symbols with them to the Nasdaq or NYSE. Ticker symbols can be reserved on a first-come basis, and that the existing symbols already in use on Second Market’s platform or by publicly traded companies will not be available.
SecondMarket focuses are larger VC back and private companies and unveiled the ticker concept for private company ticker symbols earlier this year when it created tickers for the nearly 500 companies traded on its site, including the likes of Facebook, Zynga, Twitter, and LinkedIn. SecondMarket’s private company ticker symbols have already been adopted by Stocktwits, a professional community of investors.
CapLinked is not working with SecondMarket or Stocktwits, but said it is using a system based on their models for ticker symbols. Jackson is one of the early employees of PayPal. CapLinked opened up its service in October.