- Market Commentary -

March 18, 2010 (FinancialWire) (By Bob Farley) — What’s up with the changing name of Walmart (NYSE: WMT)?

There was a time when the mom-and-pop killer was spelled Wal-Mart. Hyphen, capital letters, first three letters of the Walton name, and “mart,” which comes from the Middle Dutch “marct,” meaning market. This is still the way the company is represented on such stock sites as Yahoo Finance, as well as partially in its filings. Sometimes the hyphen is omitted along with the capital “M’” in descriptions of the filings, such as with Edgar Online and the Associated Press.

Interestingly, on its website, Walmart drops the hyphen, thinking perhaps that people are just too busy(?) to stretch their pinkies up to the hyphen on their keyboards.

Commercials on television show the name without the hyphen and the capitalized “M.”

Obviously whether you call it Wal-Mart or Walmart or Wal-mart or soulless destroyer of the old American way, the only think that owners and stockholders care is that company continues to etch out a profit. Spell it however you want.

[Go to http://www.financialwire.net/?s=bob+farley to see more commentaries and articles by Bob Farley.]

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Today in History: The British Parliament repealed the Stamp Act in 1766, but the damage was already done. American Express was founded in 1850 by Henry Wells and William Fargo. The Congress of the Confederate States of America adjourned for the last time in 1865. Hawaii signed in 1874 a treaty with the United States granting exclusive trading rights. Former Governor General Lord Stanley pledged in 1893 to donate a silver challenge cup, later named after him, as an award for the best ice hockey team in Canada. The human-powered aircraft, Pedaliante, flew 1 kilometre (0.62 miles) outside Milan in 1937. Cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov, leaving his spacecraft Voskhod 2 for 12 minutes in 1965, became the first person to walk in space.

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