Meta shares jump on name-change news — but it's a Canadian materials company, not Facebook

Shares in Canadian materials company soar after Facebook changes its name

Shares in a relatively small Canadian materials company have been surging after some misguided investors apparently thought they were getting a deal on buying stock in the world's largest social media company.

Shares in Nova Scotia based Meta Materials gained 26 per cent in after-hours trading on the Nasdaq Thursday, after Facebook Inc. announced it would be changing its name to Meta.

More than 12 million shares in the Canadian company with the ticker symbol MMAT changed hands during the trading session. That's more than double the usual daily volume.

Facebook shares trade under the symbol FB, but in December, in keeping with the company's name change focusing on the metaverse, they will change their ticker symbol to MVRS.

The Canadian company is just the latest to become a beneficiary of a specific type of mistaken identity — one that sees investors pour money into one stock because they think it's another.

In a research paper published by Rutgers University in 2019, Professor Vadim Balashov and co-author Andrei Nikiforov catalogued 254 instances of companies that saw fluctuations in their stock price related to events at another company that either had a similar name, or a similar stock ticker.