After a change to the META Ticker, Facebook’s stock falls by 6%

Since CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would change its name and focus, the stock has dropped by 42%.

Today, the company that used to be called Facebook changed its ticker symbol on the Nasdaq from FB to META to show that it is still focused on the metaverse.

Even though the company changed its name, its stock price didn’t go up right away.

The stock that used to be called FB fell 6.43 percent after the market closed on Thursday. META is presently trading at $184.00, which is close to the stock’s all-time low of $174.95 set in late April.

Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, announced the company’s name change to Meta at the end of October. This showed that the company was committed to the still-developing metaverse as the future center of its business.

The metaverse is an immersive set of digital worlds and environments that people can travel through using 3D avatars. Many developers, including Zuckerberg, think that the metaverse will be the place where people work, do business, have fun, and talk to each other in the future.

The rebranding also happened at the same time as Frances Haugen’s scathing testimony before the US Senate earlier that same month. In her testimony, the former Facebook employee talked about how the social media company allowed and promoted hate speech and fake news through its algorithms.

The change in the company’s focus has been bad for the markets. Since the news came out in October, Meta’s stock has fallen by more than 42%. It dropped 26% in a single day in February after a financial report for Q4 2021 showed that user growth had stayed the same while the company moved its resources to goals related to the metaverse.

The drop in price today comes during a tough quarter for the stock market as a whole and for crypto-related companies in particular. Today, the Nasdaq fell 2.75 percent, while Meta fell more than twice as much.

Is today’s drop a sign that people still don’t trust Zuckerberg’s metaverse pivot? Is it just a practical effect of changing the symbol, a logistical problem that could hurt trade volume? Barrons, a source of financial news, says that after a ticker change, there is usually a “substantial drop in trading activity.”