It's a finance thing, and it doesn't make sense to continue using it, when you can use k = thousands, M = millions, B = billions, T = trillions, Q = quadrillions and remove all the ambiguity.
You're completely forgetting about non-native English speakers who use the long scale in their native language. They make mistakes or might even not be aware of the difference.
I wouldn't advocate using these abbreviations in a technical document that has safety implications, but in an S-1 it's fine. If you make a mistaken trade because you can't keep your scales straight I don't really have a lot of sympathy. If they don't know the difference in the first place they're not reading this document.
I'm not referring to the metric prefixes. Other than "k" which is well known and commonly used as meaning thousand, I doubt most people would be familiar with the other prefixes. It would seem easier to just use the first letter of million, billion, etc., words which are known by most everyone.
> It would seem easier to just use the first letter of million, billion, etc., words which are known by most everyone.
English is in the minority that uses short-scale, the majority of "everyone" uses long-scale, and would therefore assume a "billion" is 10^12, not 10^9 like you would.
(Which is why you got shot down by the grandparent, the metric prefixes are globally unambiguous, your suggestion is completely English-centric)
