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What the research actually shows

The frameworks are expert opinion. This is the evidence — and the reason the scorecard keeps a separate fluency number rather than folding everything into one.

Green & Jame Journal of Financial Economics, 2013

Companies with short, easy-to-pronounce names show higher breadth of ownership, greater share turnover, lower price impact, and higher valuations on Tobin's Q and market-to-book. Effects are strongest among small firms.

Green & Jame same paper

Name changes that improve fluency are followed by increases in breadth of ownership, liquidity and firm value — the closest thing here to a causal handle.

Guzman & Stern NBER w20954, 2015 and 2016

Growth-oriented startups are more likely to have short names and less likely to be eponymous. These registration-time choices predict IPO or high-value acquisition.

Alter & Oppenheimer PNAS 103(24), 2006

Stocks with pronounceable ticker codes outperformed unpronounceable ones shortly after listing, in the lab and in NYSE and AMEX data.

Fenneman et al. PLoS ONE 18(8), 2023

Replicates the fluency effect on return expectations — and it survives telling participants that names were assigned at random, though it disappears once a price chart is shown.

Cooper, Dimitrov & Rau Journal of Finance 56(6), 2001

Firms that added ".com" to their name in 1998–99 saw roughly 74% cumulative abnormal returns over ten days — regardless of whether they had any real internet business.

Yorkston & Menon Journal of Consumer Research 31(1), 2004

Phonemes carry meaning. Front versus back vowels shift which attributes people infer about a product, and the effect operates outside awareness.

Two things worth being careful about

The evidence converges on two dimensions, not seven. Brevity and pronounceability are what the finance literature actually measures. That is why they get their own score here, and why we don't dress the other five in borrowed authority.

Cooper et al. is a warning, not an endorsement. The dot-com effect priced names irrespective of substance — a bubble artifact. A measurable effect on perception is not evidence of a good business, and nothing on this site should be read as predicting one.