When Is a Dork Like a Fang?

Now we have the Dork stocks.

Referring to four companies whose stock price recently popped, Dork combines Krispy Kreme (DNUT), Opendoor (OPEN), Rocket Mortgage (RKT) and Kohl’s (KSS).

Wall Street seems to like catchy acronyms.

Wall Street Acronyms

Fang

During the past decade, the Fang 4 have been market leaders. Perhaps first called Fang in 2013, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Google gave the S&P 500 a “major boost.”

Faang

A second possibility though is FAANG. But then we need to add Apple.

Magnificent 7

Or, sticking with tech, we could be talking about the Magnificent 7. Referring to the 1960 western film, The Magnificent 7 (about 7 powerful gunmen), in 2023, a Bank of America analyst added Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla, to the Fang group and subtracted Netflix. Also we no longer had Fang because Facebook is Meta and Google is Alphabet. (And maybe we have a Magnificent 6 because Tesla no longer belongs?)

Nifty Fifty

Many of us still remember the 50 (or so) large-cap market leaders from the 1960s and 1970s that investors were told to buy and hold. They included Xerox, Coca-Cola, IBM, Kodak, Walt Disney, Polaroid, and General Electric.

Parc

Like Dork, Parc is a contemporary acronym that might or might not stick. It stands for Palantir, Applovin, Robinhood, and Coinbase.

Granolas

My favorite name, though, is Granolas. Coined by Goldman Sachs in 2020, Granolas is a group of international stocks that Goldman compared to the Magnificent 7. The group includes: GSK (biopharma), Roche (healthcare), ASML (diversified holding company), Nestle, Novartis (healthcare)), Novo Nordisk (healthcare), L’Oreal, LVMH (luxury products), AstraZeneca, SAP (software), and Sanofi (healthcare).

Our Bottom Line: S&P 500

Since 1957, we have had the S&P 500. Representing many more equities than our acronym stocks that come and go, the S&P 500 gained approximately 10.5% annually since it was created. More recently, during the past decade, including dividends, the yearly return was closer to 13.3%.

You can see that the range was a dip of 18.1% to a 28.7% increase:

So yes, a dork is like a fang because they are both acronyms. Otherwise though, they are quite different.

My sources and more: Thanks to Sherwood New’s for inspiring today’s post. Happily, they had already looked at catchy acronyms. Following up, The Washington Post had more on the Fang 4 and CNBC told us about the Granolas. And finally, Business Insider had the S&P 500 history.