ORCID ID
0009-0006-9467-8796
Date of Award
5-2026
Degree Type
Dissertation-Restricted
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Program
Financial Economics
Department
Economics and Finance
Major Professor
Dr. Neal Maroney
Second Advisor
Dr. Mohammed Kabir Hassan
Third Advisor
Dr. Mosab Hammoudeh
Fourth Advisor
Dr. Luca Pezzo
Abstract
We investigate the link between ticker memorability and ETF investment from 1993 through 2023. Issuers often favor salient trading symbols for marketing reasons. Ticker symbol selection is non-random consistent with the strategic adoption of salient tickers to capture retail interest and justify higher fees. Using our familiarity proxies, we find ticker memorability is strongly associated with higher liquidity, idiosyncratic risk, expense ratio and retail ownership. Upgrades from non-memorable to memorable constitute the most common symbol change in our sample, exhibiting the largest post-change increases in liquidity and idiosyncratic risk. Results are robust to logit, fixed effects, correlated random effects, and difference-in-difference estimations.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Fudali, Benjamin, "The Effects of Noise Trading in Common Stocks and Exchange-Traded Funds" (2026). University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations. 3357.
https://scholarworks.uno.edu/td/3357
Rights
The University of New Orleans and its agents retain the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible this dissertation or thesis in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. The author retains all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis or dissertation.