The world of letters

In much of the world, equities are traded by symbol, not by name. In the West, symbols are usually just strings of letters, sometimes abbreviations of the company name (Microsoft is MSFT, Sirius Radio is SIRI); sometimes they ARE the company name (Yum Brands, the holding company that owns a lot of food brands like Taco Bell, is YUM; 3M is MMM); and sometimes they're just unrelated or downright silly (US Steel is X; Southwest Airlines is LUV).

Unsurprisingly, because the names of the letters of the English alphabet sound alike, traders talking to each other often spell out symbol names--"M as in Mike, S as in Sarah, F as in Frank, T as in Ted"--because making mistakes is really bad. Getting AMN confused with ANN can be a 5000% error.

I realized shortly after taking a job in the equities industry that I really should learn a formal Radio Alphabet (e.g., the NATO phonetic alphabet), but I had so much else to absorb early on that I dragged my feet around it. About two months into the job, I was walking past the trading desk and I heard one of the traders telling a customer about a trade in symbol FPP, which he then spelled out as "fuck pussy pussy".

Within 5 minutes, I had a printout of the NATO alphabet taped to my monitor. I was never going to be at that much of a loss for words.