Bom Dia!
We returned Monday from Portugal after two fantastic weeks roaming and pedaling this land famed for its explorers. We stood at Cape St. Vincent, once the end of the known world where Vasco da Gama, Ferdinand Magellan and Christopher Columbus sailed off to what many thought was a ride over the edge.
In a sense, the investor-relations and stock-picking professions are at Cape St. Vincent. The market we’ve known, the one driven by business fundamentals, is a spit of rock projecting into a vast sea of unknown currents. We are explorers on a forbidding shore.
Henry the Navigator, father of the Age of Discovery, challenged fear, superstition and entrenched beliefs to create the Harvard of sailing schools on the barren shoals of Sagres, a stone’s throw south of Cape St. Vincent. From it went intrepid adventurers who by sailing what proved to be a globe laid the cornerstones of today’s flattened earth that’s interconnected economically and culturally.
Speaking of conquering the unknown, I’m paneling for the NIRI Virtual chapter at noon ET today on the impact of Exchange Traded Funds, then tomorrow addressing the Capital Area NIRI group on how ETFs drive the market.
It’s what the money is doing. If as IR professionals we’re to fulfill our responsibilities to inform our boards about important facets of equity valuation, we have to know these things as explorers knew the sextant.
By the same token, investors, if you know only how stocks should be valued bottom-up but not how the market transforms stocks into products and data priced by arbitrage, then you’ll fail to beat the benchmark. Market Structure is as essential to navigation as was knowing currents and stars and weather patterns for yesteryear’s seafarers.
How do we at ModernIR know we’ve got the right navigational tools for today’s market? Vasco da Gama combined knowledge and forecasts learned at the School of Navigation to find a passage by sea to India.
We combine knowledge of market rules and the behavior of money with software and mathematical models that project outcomes – passages. If our knowledge is correct, our sextant will mark a course.
Our models are roughly 93% accurate in forecasting short-term prices across the entire market – a startling achievement. For comparative purposes, moving averages have no measurable statistical capacity to forecast prices, and variances between them and actual prices are factors larger than that in our models. Why use tools that don’t tell you where you’re going?
Ownership-change is a tiny fraction of trading volume. What does it tell you about how your price is set? Nothing. By contrast, patterns of behavioral change are as stark as waves in Cascais – or the world’s biggest surfers’ waves off Nazare. We see waves of sector rotation, short-term turns in the market – just like weather patterns.
We’re in an age of discovery. Some will cling to a barren spit of land, doing what they’ve always done. The rest will set a new course to a future of clarity about how stocks are priced and valued and how money behaves. Which group will you be in?
Hope to see you at a NIRI chapter meeting soon! And ask us how we can help you navigate the coming earnings season with better tools.
