From FANG to BATMMAAN, BRICS to PIGS — why investors obsess over acronyms and monikers
Finance can be kind of boring, so we make stuff up about GRANOLAS and BATs to make it fun. How long those acronyms are useful depends on the markets.
Few industries love an acronym more than finance. Some are warranted: EBITDA, a measure of profit, would be a pain to write out in full every time. Some of them, like BRICs — a term coined by Goldman Sachs economist Jim O’Neill in 2001 to refer to the fast-growing economies of Brazil, Russia, India, and China — or the once debt-laden PIGs — Portugal, Italy, Greece, and Spain — become focal points for debates about the future shape of the global economy. Others, like FOMO (fear of missing out) or YOLO (you only live once), get hijacked and become verbs used by traders to explain their insane bets.
FANG > MAGMA > MAG 7 > BATMMAAN
In 2020, back when Meta was still Facebook and Big Tech was big instead of colossally massive, I tried to coin the term FAATMAN with a chart that looked a bit like a ransom note. It didn’t catch on like the Magnificent 7 (or Mag 7) did. C’est la vie.
But last week, America’s second largest chipmaker, Broadcom, soared on the back of strong earnings. With the company’s CEO talking up the opportunity in AI, the company’s stock climbed over $215 a share — bringing Broadcom into the exclusive trillion-dollar market-cap club, America’s eighth public company to currently hold that badge of honor.
With Broadcom now a bona fide stock-market stud, I wondered whether it might open up some new mnemonic madness. So I sat down on my sofa playing Scrabble in my head. A few minutes later, it hit me: BATMMAAN. Would it would work? I pinged our newsroom to check my spelling, and confirmed that even with Broadcom’s ticker confusingly being AVGO — a relic from when Avago Technologies Limited acquired Broadcom in 2016 — I could finally make my modest offering to the history of goofy stock-market buzzwords.
But the shelf-life of wacky acronyms or monikers is generally short, with none outlasting the relevance of their components, and BATMMAAN will be no different.
In the 1960s and 1970s there was the Nifty Fifty, an informal group of ~50 US stocks that were the foundation of “buy and hold” portfolios for investors looking to invest in blue-chip names. The nickname lost a little luster when the markets turned sharply at the beginning of 1973 and faded over the following decade as the 50 fell out of favor.
A similar fate befell FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google) arguably the original Big Tech acronym, coined by Bob Lang and popularized by Jim Cramer on the CNBC show “Mad Money.” Netflix had been a rocket, but in terms of scale it didn’t match up to the rest of tech. Even after a phenomenal 2024 (gaining 92%), Netflix’s market cap is only $385 billion, just over one-tenth of Apple’s. And so FANG gave way to FAANG, and then a flood of other initialisms — FAAMG, MANTAMAN, MAMAA, and more — came and went. Analysts have espoused the wonders of the GRANOLAS stocks in Europe and the Asian tech giants of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, which were the original BAT stocks.
Catchy acronyms work because we all want something easy to remember, a catchphrase we can call back to quickly. But whether BATMMAAN has longevity will depend on how relevant those names remain, and whether the voracious appetite for high-growth, sometimes volatile, tech companies persists.
But at the moment, these eight stocks — Broadcom, Apple, Tesla, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Alphabet, and Nvidia — are the mass at the center of the market:
They’ve gained $6.2 trillion in market cap this year, represent 12% of the S&P 500’s revenue, 26% of its profit, and 34% of its weighting — but most crucially of all, each of them in their own way is tightly wrapped up with the stock-market theme of the moment, artificial intelligence, such that anyone seeking to invest in AI would be making a very bold call to ignore those stocks. To borrow from another finance acronym, born during the zero-interest-rate era, TINA: there is no alternative to these eight companies. For now.
