Parle Industries hits upper circuit amid ‘Melody’ confusion

Mumbai: When William Shakespeare wrote “What’s in a name?”, he wouldn’t have imagined investors’ long-running habit of making erroneous stock bets based purely on name similarities. Yet that behavioural quirk once again played out on Dalal Street on Wednesday.

After a social media video showed Prime Minister Narendra Modi handing a ‘Melody’ toffee to his Italian counterpart Giorgia Meloni, some traders mistakenly piled into shares of Parle Industries, confusing it with the unlisted Parle Products, the original owner of the candy brand.

Shares of Parle Industries, formerly known as Parle Software, surged 5% – the stock’s upper trading limit for the day – suggesting an absence of sellers. Volumes in the penny stock with a market cap of ₹25 crore also spiked on Wednesday, with over 8.57 lakh shares changing hands, nearly three times its two-week average daily volume of 2.8 lakh shares. Shares of Parle Industries ended at ₹5.25 on Wednesday.

Parle Industries had reported a revenue of ₹4.68 crore and a net profit of ₹45.7 lakh in FY25.

Such mix-ups are not uncommon. In 2025, on the day of the stock market debut of LG Electronics India, some investors ended up mistakenly scooping up shares of a similarly named company: LG Balakrishnan and Bros, a Coimbatore-based auto component maker founded in 1937.

This has happened often in Tata Motors and Tata Motors’ Differential Voting Rights (DVR) shares, especially during news-heavy days when retail investors rushed to buy Tata Motors shares but ended up buying DVRs by mistake.