Paula, the reason the letters are red is to indicate that it is a broken link, which is an error. They would be red if you didn't change the hyphen to an equal sign, but changed anything in that portion so that it is not a valid page name.
The code uses double brackets to enclose 2 things - the first thing is a profile or free space page on WikiTree and the second thing is the "hot" text (the text that will be displayed as the link to the page in the first thing). The pipe character "|" is used to separate the link and the hot text. If you use anything at all that is not a valid name of a profile or free space page in the first part then the "hot" text in the second part will be red. For example, you could have just put the LNAB without either the hyphen or the number - that would not be a valid WikiTree ID, so the hot text would be red.
Please follow Maggie's advice when you want to make something red.