When you want to buy shares in a company and you don’t want to sound like a doofus, you use the ticker symbol that it’s listed under. Ford is simply F, Microsoft is MSFT, and a random French bank is CRAP. When Ferrari goes on sale on the New York Stock Exchange in just a few weeks, it’ll be under RACE.
New Business Netherlands, soon to be re-named Ferrari NV because the Italian company listing on an American exchange is a Dutch company mostly for tax purposes and DON’T ASK QUESTIONS ABOUT IT, shared the anticipated listing symbol in its prospectus filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Fiat Chrysler, which is selling off 10% of Ferrari to the general public and spinning about 80% off to its own shareholders, expects to price the company between $48 and $52 a share upon the initial offering, which would value the company at about $10 billion.
And if the banks doing the deal get it done right, it should see a 20% pop by the end of the day, putting the company at $12 billion, which is enough to buy 400,000 very lightly used Ferrari 308s.
Or 8474.57627119 LaFerraris. We’ll assume the .57627119 is for a very nice sandwich, or something.
It’s a little unclear where Ferrari, winner of 222 Grand Prix and 16 Formula One Constructor’s Championships finds inspiration from the name, but Google tells me the word “race” is derived from late Old English, and the even older Old Norse rás, meaning ‘current’:
It was originally a northern English word with the sense ‘rapid forward movement,’ which gave rise to the senses ‘contest of speed’ (early 16th century) and ‘channel, path’ (i.e., the space traversed). The verb dates from the late 15th century.
Amazing, and so educational.
Though it doesn’t beat CRAP.
Photo credit: Getty Images
H/t to Reuters!
Contact the author at ballaban@jalopnik.com.
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