A crypto farm in Cluj-Napoca, Romania, last year.
Photo:
Akos Stiller/Bloomberg News
We have all found money in the couch. Now people are mistaking a couch for money.
a furniture company that definitely won’t let you pay in bitcoin, has seen a surge of retail-investor interest recently. Its ticker symbol, ETH, is the same as the one used for red-hot ethereum. Message boards for the stock are mostly filled with banter about the cryptocurrency, not the company.
“We’ve definitely seen a massive increase on a percentage basis in mistaken activity on the Ethan Allen stream,” says Rishi Khanna, Chief Executive Officer of social investing site Stocktwits.
The confusion persists despite ribbing by other posters. On Yahoo Finance, for example: “$ETH to the moon!—give us something to sit in when we get there!” And: “In the year 2030, all transactions will be settled digitally with Ethan Allen interiors stock.”
With some novice investors buying first and asking questions later, it might even have spilled over into actual purchases. Turnover for Ethan Allen in the past month is 56% above its five-year average. That might not be a bad thing. Back in the dot-com boom, some investors allegedly bought “the wrong
” purchasing shares of food services company
by mistake. Since March 2000, it has outperformed the once red-hot networking stock by 728 percentage points.
Write to Spencer Jakab at spencer.jakab@wsj.com
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