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| | On Wall St., alphabet is up for grabs - Feb. 3, 2005 |
 | | When the transactions are completed, it could leave as many as 11 of the potential 26 one-letter symbols unoccupied, if no other companies assume their places. |
 | | Stock symbols, the abbreviations under which all public companies trade, originated just after the Civil War, with the invention of the ticker, a sort of gussied-up telegraph machine that allowed information about stock prices to be widely disseminated. |
 | | For a symbol intended to connote success, a surprising number of uni-letter stocks have been losers. |
| money.cnn.com /2005/02/03/markets/ticker_symbols/index.htm (712 words) |
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