By Jason Zweig
Last week, struggling shoe company Allbirds announced that it would convert itself into a provider of artificial-intelligence computing power called NewBird AI, and the stock shot up 582% in a day.
That was no surprise to Michael Cooper, a finance professor at the University of Utah. In the late 1990s, lots of companies added ".com" or "Internet" to their corporate names to pump their share prices during the tech boom. (Before Computer Literacy Inc. could even officially change its name to fatbrain.com, the stock shot up 33%.) In a research paper published in 2001, Cooper and his colleagues found that firms that opportunistically renamed themselves got a 53% short-term boost in stock-market returns.
Naturally, when the dot-com boom went bust between 2000 and 2002, companies raced to erase ".com" and "Internet" from their names. In another study, Cooper and his colleagues found that scrubbing dot-com names gave stocks a short-term upward jolt averaging 64%.
The same sort of silliness repeated a few years ago when companies started stuffing references to cryptocurrency into their corporate names. For instance, when Long Island Iced Tea Co. became Long Blockchain Corp. in 2017, the stock surged by as much as 531%. (The following year, the stock was delisted.)
Before Allbirds fluttered into NewBirdAI, I asked Cooper to look at whether companies announcing a pivot to AI have been getting a stock boost. He and his colleagues Peter Won and Hanjun Kim looked at firms that shifted their stated business strategy to "AI." Here's how they did on average, relative to the overall stock market, in the 30 days before and the 90 days after they touted the change.
Sure enough, it's deja vu all over again!
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Wall Street Words: 'Hedge'
My colleagues Matt Wirz and Alex Saeedy recently reported that hedge funds are seeking to bet against private credit. Let's look at where the term hedge fund comes from. (This item is part of my series on the origins and history of Wall Street lingo; the previous entry, on the term fund, is here.)
Over its long history, dating back some 1,200 years in English, the word hedge has carried an extraordinary combination of meanings, ranging all the way from regal (even divine) power to safety, protection and shelter, all the way to immoral, disgusting behavior.
As the etymologist Anatoly Liberman has pointed out, in its earliest forms, haga, hegg and hegge, the word meant "enclosure" or "yard," especially the residence of a feudal lord. That early meaning extended across several European languages. The formal name of the Dutch city the Hague, ' s-Gravenhage, means "the count's enclosure." Today's hedge-fund titans tend to have a huge haga, spending tens of millions of dollars on homes.
Centuries ago, a hedge also invoked the Latin term "hortus conclusus," or enclosed garden. Writers and painters often symbolized the Virgin Mary's immaculate purity by placing her within a hedge.
Hedge and haw derive from the Proto-Indo-European root kagh, "to catch." A hawthorn is a shrub, often used in hedges, whose sharp thorns catch on intruders' clothes or skin.
Of course, the thorns also provide protection. To "hedge" a bet was an obvious extension of the way a hedgerow protects those inside it. By 1672, George Villiers wrote in his play "The Rehearsal":
Criticks, do your worst, that here are met;
For, like a Rook, I have hedged in my Bet.
(A "rook" was a cheater or, sometimes, the victim of cheating.)
It's the protective sense of a hedge that Alfred Winslow Jones, the former Marxist sociologist who coined the modern term "hedged fund" in 1949, had in mind. He sought to protect his fund investors by offsetting leveraged long bets on good stocks with short-selling bets against bad stocks. Unlike his imitators, Jones always insisted on using the word "hedged" rather than "hedge."
The thorny protection of hedges led to other historical meanings, though. In early England, drifters and vagrants crawled under hedges for shelter -- and other doings. All kinds of mischief might unfold in the shadows: sex, cheating, robbery. By the 17th and 18th centuries, hedge had become an insulting adjective:
A hedge-born man was, presumably, one who had been conceived in a sexual encounter under the shrubbery. In Shakespeare's "Henry VI, Part 1," the brave nobleman Talbot sneers at any knight who is "quite degraded, like a hedge-born swain." A hedge-wench was promiscuous, and a hedge-priest was illiterate. In Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost," buffoonish actors play "the pedant, the braggart, the hedge priest, the fool, and the boy."
The Oxford English Dictionary later expanded Johnson's definition of the adjective: "...an attribute expressing contempt...performed, produced, worked under a hedge, in by-ways, or clandestinely...inferior, 'common,' 'third-rate' quality."
The individual investors who perceived hedge funds as secretive, sinister market manipulators during the meme-stock craze of 2020-21 were invoking a deeply embedded meaning of the word "hedge" they might not have been aware of. The hedge-born man conceived in a hookup under the hawthorn bushes in 17th-century Britain was the direct linguistic ancestor of today's naked short-sellers.
Catching Up
My last column, "It's Getting Harder to Tell Investing from Gambling, and It's Not Your Fault," is here. Reader Tim Torkildson of Virginia emailed a sardonic haiku in response:
A weedy meadow
Full of burdock and daisies.
Which do I pick?
To which I say: The daisies, of course!
My previous column, "The Investment That Can Shield You in Uncertain Times," was about Treasury inflation-protected securities. Here it is.
Last Word
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April 21, 2026 15:30 ET (19:30 GMT)
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