One of the last remaining shreds of the Facebook corporate identity disappeared, as Meta Platforms officially changed its stock ticker symbol from ‘FB’ to ‘META’.

The change comes months after Facebook changed its corporate name to Meta, reflecting the company’s pivot into the metaverse and its bet on a virtual, more immersive digital world.

However, the FB symbol has still been prevalent on search engines and news tickers, until now. It has traded as FB for a decade, since Facebook’s IPO in 2012.

Waiting game
When changing its corporate name, the company said it would change its ticker symbol to ‘MVRS’, an apparent take on Metaverse. However, it then postponed the change without giving a reason.

Notably, it was unable to use META because it was already owned by exchange-traded fund Roundhill Ball and its Metaverse ETF.

Conveniently, Roundhill then changed the ticker of its Metaverse ETF to ‘METV’ in January this year, freeing up the META symbol.

CNN reported the two companies may have held discussions about letting Meta take the symbol it wanted.

Speaking to Reuters, Art Hogan, chief market strategist at National Securities in New York, said companies that change their ticker and official name “are usually trying to signal that there has been a fundamental change in the underlying business model”.