Calgon, Take Me Away from Carlyle

Ticker alert! Are traders mistaking Calgon Carbon Corporation for Carlyle Capital Corporation today?

Shares of Calgon, a Pennsylvania-based chemicals company, are down seven percent today. The only news headline under its Yahoo Finance quote from today is this: "Carlyle's Painful Default" from TheStreet.com.

The story, of course, is referring to Carlyle Capital Corporation, which trades on the Amsterdam stock exchange under the symbol 'CCC.' It announced that it received seven margin calls yesterday on debt backing its $22 billion bond portfolio, and it was unable to meet the requirements on four of them.

Aside from TheStreet.com article, many of the press stories about Carlyle refer to it by its initials, CCC. Perhaps that's to distinguish Carlyle Capital from its parent company, the Carlyle Group.

Calgon, for its part, was having a pretty good week until today. Yesterday, it announced it was awarded a $55 million contract to remove mercury from coal-fired power plants in the Midwest.

Hasty traders have been known to fire off the wrong ticker on a buy or sell order countless times before. Sometimes, it works to their advantage: in 1999, shares of the building maintenance company Temco (TMCO) tripled on the day of the initial public offering of Ticketmaster Online (TMCS) after Reuters mistakenly referred to Temco's ticker.

And more recently, CNBC erroneously showed the stock chart for Petrobras Energia (PZE) during a story about its parent company Petroleo Brasileiro (PBR). PZE shares spiked 30 percent, prompting two analysts to downgrade the stock on valuation concerns.

Volume in CCC isn't out through the roof today, so it's possible there's some other reason to dump Calgon shares. And plenty of traders did find their way to the proper Carlyle Capital Corporation stock today. Its shares fell 58 percent in Amsterdam.

by Megan Barnett