Furniture Retailer Ethan Allen, Tired of Its Search Traffic Going Into the Ether, Changes Stock Ticker

U.S. furniture maker and retailer Ethan Allen Interiors wants you to know that its vision of American design is meant to evoke "Classic, Country & Coastal and Modern." It does not do crypto.

To make this clear, the company announced Thursday it is changing its New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) ticker symbol from “ETH” to “ETD” to avoid confusion with the cryptocurrency ether.

The Danbury, Conn.-based company’s stock soared earlier this year, which many analysts attributed to retail traders confusing its symbol with the identical abbreviation for ether, the native currency of the Ethereum network.

“We’ve definitely seen a massive increase on a percentage basis in mistaken activity on the Ethan Allen stream,” Rishi Khanna, CEO of Stocktwits, told the Wall Street Journal in May.

Clearly, the retailer had had enough. “This change will better differentiate Ethan Allen news from Ethereum news in search results, as Ethereum is often abbreviated as ETH,” CEO Farooq Kathwari said in the press release.

Farooq said the "D" in the new ticker symbol stands for “design.”

Ticker confusion is not unique to Ethan Allen. Similar confusion has been seen in the stock market as retail traders mistake unrelated companies for chat application Clubhouse or encrypted messaging application Signal. Researchers have been finding correlations between corporation name changes and internet-related “dotcom” names for decades.

In fact, Ethan Allen’s management could have perhaps been forgiven for going the other direction and trying to increase its association with the cryptocurrency. After all, while the furniture retailer’s stock price climbed nearly 80% since last August, the price of ether soared about 580% during the same time period.

The change to “ETD” will take place on Aug. 16, ending 28 years of “ETH” for Ethan Allen since the company’s initial public offering in 1993.