Speaking of gales, JP Morgan blew one through markets. So many have opined that I balk at compounding the cacophony. My own mother is throwing around the acronym “JPM” in emails.

But there’s something you should understand about JPM and market structure, IR folks. First, put this on your calendar at NIRI National next month: EMC’s global head of IR, Tony Takazawa, is moderating a panel Monday June 4, at 4:15p, on IR Targeting and Investor Trading Behaviors (scroll down to it). The aim: Understand how markets have changed, how institutions have adapted, and what that means to gaining buyside interest today. I’ll be there, and we hope you will be.

Back to JP Morgan. You could define “market structure” in many ways. We prefer “the behavior of money behind price and volume.” What’s JPM got to do with that?

A lot. We observed in the days before word broke about trading woes at the big custodian for Fannie and Freddie that its program-trading volumes in equities were down by wide margins across the market-cap spectrum. It disappeared entirely from some small-cap clients that it typically trades algorithmically with great consistency (indexes, models, ETFs).

These facts raised no particular red flag because we saw widespread discordance in program-trading last week. Then word of JPM’s whale of a London loss broke. Maybe it was coincidental that its program-trading volumes fell. Regardless, it demonstrates the interconnected nature of markets today. Missteps in the risk-management arm of a bank can blight program-trading in health care, technology and other equities.

Also before the news hit, we saw a singular risk event marketwide May 8-9. Re-risking – balancing equity-risk exposure with derivative hedges – was measurable and visible in nearly every issue. The euro, we surmised. Market risk over currencies is grave now.

But it may have been a chain reaction. Declines across a set of algorithms could have triggered responses by risk-monitoring software for other banks and institutional investors. Picture one car braking on a crowded and whizzing freeway. Some stocks spiked, some plunged, some gyrated, some were dead calm.

And it wasn’t investment behavior.

Market structure matters to IR today. If you don’t have metrics for monitoring it, your management team isn’t as well-informed as it should be – and may be flying blind. Be sure to catch the panel at NIRI. We’ll talk about why these things occur.

Soberly, it requires no genius to grasp that a structure in which one party hedging a bet might disrupt the entire ecosystem is what the Brits would call suboptimal. Just remember: The market didn’t choose this structure. Structure was forced upon it through three little words: “national market system.”

One of our ranks stepped up to the stock-exchange rule-filing plate, planted, and cracked that fastball out of the park. Thank you, Katie Keita, for commenting on the Nasdaq’s proposal for ETF sponsors to pay market-makers.

I hope it’s a trend. Your stocks underpin everything else. These are your markets.

More on that later. But speaking of trends, yesterday the dollar rose and stocks fell. When the greenback gains on other major currencies, things valued in dollars often decline. Stocks are stores of value, and value ebbs or flows according to the measuring tape – currencies. The dollar fell in April (after an early buck spike garroted equities), so stocks rose proportionally. Then as April ended, the dollar strengthened on mounting global worries (especially from Europe). Stocks shrank. It’s a macro effect that trumps stories.

How should you view macro factors from the IR chair? “Macro factors” is jargon for “how appraisers view the global neighborhood.” There was a good article on the Big Picture (page R9, “How the Big Picture Affects Stock Picks”) in the Wall Street Journal Monday May 7. Writer Suzanne McGee says macro factors shouldn’t make investors reflexive but can’t be ignored either.

You’re not investing, of course. But you’re selling to investors. If your target market is influenced by macro factors, and you’re not, you may be striking discordant notes.

Here’s an analogy. You’re the real estate agent. In the IR chair, you’re marketing a house in a neighborhood. If the subdivision looks to buyers like the spectral resurrection of mortgage-backed securities, good luck getting a conventional buyer at the seller’s price.

But you might attract an all-cash offer from deep pockets. And if deep pockets step in, they may draw others. Next thing you know, the neighborhood is booming. That’s how you should see the spectrum of institutional investors today. All-cash, deep pockets – that’s hedge funds. They are a bridge to less flexible money. From deep-value high-turnover, to growth-at-a-reasonable price, to value, to growth, target buyers suited to the neighborhood and to the state of the subdivision. It’s dynamic, ever-changing.

If you’re not keeping up with dynamics of markets, you’re probably not maximizing shareholder value.

Which brings us back to rules in your markets. The number of public companies keeps falling. It seems like three names go private for each new IPO. But ETFs, indexes, swaps, derivatives, pairs-trades, structured products – it all keeps increasing. We’ve got the equity version of 2008 around us. In a sense, indexes and ETFs have become like mortgage-backed securities, tranches of derivatives sliced and sold as safe and secure even as the cash stream for every tranche begins at the same wellspring and shows signs of drying up. A market built on derivatives is not a safe place.

If we want safe markets, we should demand them. The companies whose shares form the market bedrock. How? For one, we can confront market rules that foster more trading in derivatives.

IR pros, what an opportunity! You – all of us – can steer a new course that changes the neighborhood. That’s awfully darned important (Joe Biden could phrase it better).

It’s earnings season. Fifty-seven percent of our clients have reported, our data show. In the past five days across the Nasdaq segment, rational investment activity – which means what you think it means – was 11.1% of volume.

Translating, just over one of ten trades in Nasdaq-listed companies (the NYSE was better but could flip-flop next week) resulted from active investment. Statistically, 88.9% of volume – not as cool as 99% but we report what the data show – was driven by something besides thoughtful investment.

Did your stock behave as you expected when you reported?

Our first client to report plunged through hedges and closed down 13%, and we hadn’t hit options expirations (Apr 18-20). A host of clients with calls before Apr 20 beat expectations and gave solid guidance. Half closed up; the other half, down.

Do the 11.1% matter? Unequivocally. So do the 88.9%. I’ll give you examples. A small-cap tech company last week closed down 6% on a miss and weak guidance, but data showed shares trading in what we call the “Midrange,” meaning money had mixed reactions. The stock’s up now.

Wait a minute, you say. How can money have mixed reactions to a miss? A lot of money doesn’t value shares on multiples alone. Any more than world markets peg the US dollar to its redemption value from the US Treasury (zero).

Shares have relative value, and speculative value. Relative value means “what’s this stock worth compared to alternatives in the group or market?” Speculative value means “will this stock help me net a profit in a portfolio of things that fluctuate?” Good answers to both questions can mean stocks rise on – or right after – misses.

Seeing how different market behaviors value shares is crucial to understanding how equity prices behave. We track how fund managers and their counterparties – by actions not names – hedge risk. That’s an important price, because it’s like knowing how much value is insured against loss.

Here’s an example of relative value. A large-cap broke a long string of rising quarterly profits. Behavioral data showed beforehand that rational investors were banking on better. Disaster? The stock slipped 2%, to the comfortable “Midrange” and started rising in two days. How? Programs. Funds and models buy industries. In this sector, there are fewer than five choices. Neighborhood value.

Rational investment behavior is only one constituency. It’s small but a big deal, like independent voters in major national elections. The swing vote sets outcomes in battleground states. Every day, your shares are a battleground state. In the Nasdaq slice of the market we follow, 11.1% of recent participants were tallying multiples of forward cash flows and reacting to them. They’re the independent voters, so to speak.

They matter. A mega cap reported outstanding results smack in the middle of options expirations. The stock declined – as behavioral data predicted. Post-call behavioral sentiment was negative and predicted more price pressure.

But then, rational investors – tempted by bargains – stepped in, resetting what we call “Rational Price.” Since then, the stock has risen and now trades higher than the pre-call level.

Two big lessons, IR folks:

IR is indispensable. The 11.1% matter. Without an effective IR program, you can’t turn the swing vote and win battleground states. It’s easy to revile the 88.9%. But they’re just constituents with different views.

Data are indispensable. Measure, measure, measure. Poll, poll, poll. Yeah, I don’t like it either. But them’s the facts. In battles of inches, you need to know who your constituents are, what they think, and how they’ll react.

The IR chair armed with good data-analytics wins campaigns and occupies earnings seasons.

No. They’re not IR professionals. But stay with me for two minutes.

One says, “He’s got a good swing.”

“He’s got the build of a hitter,” adds another.

“Been playing ball his whole life,” a third guy says.

In last year’s Brad Pitt movie, Moneyball, baseball scouts size up players with the right look because that’s the way it’s always been done.

The movie tells how Billy Bean at the Oakland A’s stood that idea on its head and transformed baseball with data-analytics. What wins games? Runners on base. By any means. For the rest of that story, see the movie.

The rest of our story here is a radical IR proposal. For the past 20 years, the investor-relations profession has relied on our industry’s version of “the build of a good hitter.” You do certain things because that’s the way it’s always been done.

What if there’s more to it? As data-analytics has transformed baseball, internet search, how grocery-store shelves are stocked, and the way advertisements connect people and products, it should also transform IR.

What if you could know the value – call it Rational Price – investors assign to your shares, because you can see it and separate it from market noise and speculation and basket-trading? You could redefine valuation for management.

What if instead of looking at who bought and sold your shares last week, you measured the share of your equity market controlled by rational investment activity – and set a goal to exceed the market average for rational investment? You’d transform your program from backward-looking, to forward-thinking.

What if you could know the sentiment of your equity market ahead of earnings because you were tracking behaviors by purpose and time-horizon? You’d move beyond a myopia that sees the market as a singular motivation, to a holistic view of signal sorted from noise, a mosaic of market activity that moves from threat to opportunity. You would be on the offensive, not the defensive.

What if you organized relationship-building with holders and new investors around the dynamic appeal of your equity market – growth, value, growth-at-a-reasonable price – rather than a static investment thesis? You’d move from two-dimensional targeting, to three-dimensional targeting.

That would be radical. It’s also possible and happening. Here and now. Trading is mathematical. Math can be measured. Just like a baseball player, who swings the bat finite times at quantifiable pitches consisting of balls and strikes.

We can go on watching game film. But maybe IROs of the future, who will add value for management in a new era of trading and capital formation, will move beyond the swing of the bat to what it produces.

What it produces can be measured. We track these IR statistics in our radically revolutionary Market Structure Report. It’s two pages. It transforms the way you think about what matters in IR.

In our PowerPoint presentation called “Running a Modern Investor Relations Program Using Data Analytics,” we explain how to transform your IR strategy through the power of new tools built for the new rules that run today’s capital markets.

Ask, and we’ll send the presentation. And if you’re not using the Market Structure Report to understand your equity market, try it. Leave that old table and view the world a new way.

With that setup, we have a story to tell you. In a minute.

First, we said last week: “Overall sentiment is surprisingly good in money behind client shares. Stocks may recover quickly.”

Spot on. It shows how data-analytics help us understand market behavior. But remember our qualifier: “The DXY dollar index shows the same fissures it had last summer when the Euro nearly came undone. This currency crisis is coming back in weeks or months.”

We stand by that. The Infinite Elasticity Theorem posited by central banks is about to snap. It goes like this: “In times of crisis, expand the supply of money until the problem disappears under a pile of paper, because we can’t handle the truth, so we don’t want you to either.”

To our story. The Nasdaq has asked the SEC to approve its Market Quality Program, in which sponsors of thinly traded (under 2m shares daily) Exchange Traded Funds would pay market makers to trade the ETFs. The Nasdaq says these payments will stimulate trading in the ETFs, thus narrowing spreads, making markets efficient, enhancing market confidence and integrity, and boosting volumes in issuer components of the ETFs.

What’s wrong with this reasoning? Here’s a list:

-Paying market makers is illegal (see what our good friends at Themis Trading say). The rule requires amending FINRA rule 5250 prohibiting such payments. Creating exceptions to rules gave us the Tax Code. Do you want your public market to resemble the Tax Code?

 -ETFs are derivatives. Authorized participants create and redeem shares of ETFs. SEC rules allow ETFs to substitute cash and derivatives for components, and authorized participants – large brokers and institutional investors – can create or redeem themselves into and out of ETFs. What an ingenious statistical arbitrage tool! But it’s no help for aligning share prices with multiples of cash flow.

-Who benefits from statistical arbitrage? Exchanges depending for revenue and profits on data and transactions. Their top clients, the high-frequency traders intermediating trading in stocks, indexes, ETFs and the related options and futures that comprise the statistical arbitrage puzzle. Brokers (also big exchange clients). The SEC, which collects a Section 31 fee on each trade.

-The rule’s regulatory justification and functional purpose don’t match. We don’t fault the Nasdaq. It’s a for-profit business. But the Nasdaq filed the rule to compete for transactions in Tape B securities (exchange-traded products) and to drive transactional and data revenue and profits through arbitrage. Saying it does something else is misleading.

And saying something is good for markets does not make it so. In addition to the colossal central-bank currency footprint tromping through equities, the other chief distortion in your capital markets is statistical arbitrage. More is less.

If the stocks of public companies are the credit card, so to speak, that underpins every index and each ETF, then this proposal differs little from lending me your gold card so I can buy myself things because I told you it would be good for you.

That’s ridiculous. Public companies, speak up! Comment on the proposal. You’ve got till roughly May 2 to offer the SEC a letter. This is your market. Not some arbitrage playground.

Value is relative. And yet. Anybody in the IR chair pencils valuations for his or her shares. Isn’t this the battle – measuring value? Karen and I on a recent trip sat with a sharp IR pro who explained how the team had an internal valuation model for company stock.

Many consider historical price-to-earnings ratios of the S&P 500 (about 16 over 130 years but ranging from below 9 in 1933 and 1983, to 40-plus in 2000, the record). Some like the S&P earnings yield versus 10-year Treasurys (7% to 2%). On that basis, markets would seem to be a whopping good buy.

And yet the Dow was down 500 points in five days through Tuesday.

There are three immutable valuation meters. You’ve got future value of cash flows. For instance, somebody at Facebook determined that Instagram’s future cash flows discounted to present value are worth $1 billion rather than the current figure of zero.

There’s net worth. When Microsoft bought AOL patents this week for $1 billion, the market added the cash to AOL’s net worth and shares shot up about 20%.

And third, there are comparables. In a residential neighborhood, you can’t do a sum-of-parts calculation. You can’t run discounted cash flow analysis, really. Instead, you compare it to other similar things. In 2006, my house on a golf course in northern California was valued at $800,000 on a comparables basis. Today the same house owned by somebody else has a Zillow estimate of $430,000.

Whew. And yet. That’s a lot higher than prices in 1999.

Back to markets. Do we think the present value of discounted future cash flows of the 30 components of the Dow Jones Industrial Average has plunged 4% the last five days? Possible but doubtful. It’s also implausible that net worth for these companies has taken a five-day drubbing.

Then it’s comparables. To what are stocks being compared that they have lost at least temporary luster? The economy? Our excellent data assessments beneath the skin of markets show money moving Mar 28-30, before moods on jobs turned sour.

So what changed? In a word, money. The specter of currency wars, quiet since December and fostering a placid surface on equities, is roiling again. If the value of money suddenly becomes suspect or relative, so do values of things denominated by them, and the first to be affected are securities sought by the nimblest money. Stocks. Derivatives. Bonds. Commodities.

Yet over and over we hear it still: It’s some holder dumping shares. That could be a reaction, but it’s not the reason.

Can’t it be rumors and investors? Sure, about 12% of the time. The other 88%, relative value – comparables – is machinating your shares, sometimes minute-by-minute.

How can we know? Because currencies are valued relatively. They have no net worth. I think much of the world is caught up in valuing things with incorrect metrics today (that’s another story).

IR folks, try to move beyond the old model of supposing something fundamental is driving every price move. And why would that be in your best interest anyway?

Wouldn’t it be better, more statistical and measurable, to size up what behaviors are moving your price, separating the stuff that behaves according to multiples of cash from the rest reacting to relative value, and report on that daily, or weekly, or monthly or quarterly – or all the above – to management?

A shot at what’s ahead: Overall sentiment is surprisingly good in money behind client shares. Stocks may recover quickly. But looking ahead, the DXY dollar index shows the same fissures it had last summer when the Euro nearly came undone. This currency crisis is coming back in weeks or months, we think.

Speaking of hot and cold, we told clients to expect a good start Monday for the new quarter, followed by the strong likelihood of a big move Tuesday or Wednesday as imbalances from the quarter exited broker-dealers. The Dow was down more than 100 points intraday Tuesday.

Why are these outcomes predictable?

In answer, ever heard of Mexican film maker Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga? The duo sadly parted ways after making Babel (Brad Pitt, Cate Blanchett), the third film following Amores Perros (Benicio del Toro) and 21 Grams (Naomi Watts, Sean Penn) with disparate threads woven into haunting themes on life and meaning.

Markets have recently given us disparate threads that can be loomed into predictive thematic raiment. Rumblings continue about the dramatic BATS Exchange IPO debacle March 23. The market-structure bugs at Zero Hedge advanced a theory that a deliberate algorithmic tactic torpedoed the IPO.

We wrote last month on the dramatic moves in the Credit Suisse-backed exchange-traded note (ETN) called TVIX. Last week, the Wall Street Journal was among many observers including the SEC to pick up the theme. TVIX leverages returns on the VIX, the implied volatility of the S&P 500. While the VIX stayed placid, the TVIX screamed to such heights that Credit Suisse stopped creating new units. It then cratered after VIX futures expired Mar 21.

And finally, disparate thread number three: On Tuesday Apr 3 (an earlier version incorrectly said Mar 3) at precisely 2pm ET, when the Federal Reserve released notes from last month’s Open Market Committee meeting, the US dollar jumped in value and stocks plunged about 100 points.

What meaning lies in this weave that tells us how markets will behave? Nothing less than truth: Mathematics drive outcomes. The pursuit of divergence in such markets can have extreme consequences, and the foible isn’t the pursuit but the fact that math has replaced human color. And third, if the market marches so publicly to the beat of the Fed drum one day…how do you know that it’s not doing so the rest of the time?

Which is why if you’re doing IR the old way, on guesses and hunches, you really, really need to join the 21st century, where we have predictive analytics that warn of tornadoes on the horizon or rich fields ahead.

Coming full circle, my grandmother told me before she died about waving as a very young girl to Buffalo Bill Cody as he drove through Hastings, NE in his shiny new automobile, bound back home to Denver. He died in January 1917. And there we stood Sunday at Buffalo Bill’s grave.

Sunday I deep-watered trees in shorts and flip flops. Tuesday we walked to a meeting down the street with coats and gloves on.

Beware fleeting reality.

How would you expect stocks to react? Exactly. They would soar, as they did Monday March 26.

Speaking of bizarro-world, if you missed the BATS Exchange IPO drama Friday, you must have been on a monastic sojourn in the hinterlands. It showed several things. You can run a great business. You can raise money from investors. You can be quality folks who are nice to boot, as our friends at BATS are.

But if somebody forgets to carry the one in that mathematical equation for the opening auction, the incredible shrinkage occurring in the dollar can immediately translate to your shares, speeded up to nanoseconds.

Humor aside, we were asked by various members of the media (and quoted by the WSJ Saturday for the lead article on page one) and many clients about BATS. Should you worry about trading markets because the IPO for a technology-driven stock exchange failed?

Not for that reason. BATS will be fine. They will be back, and soon. Mark it.

But something should concern you. We’ll come to it in a moment.

First, here’s what happened at BATS. Exchanges want to host listings for the profitable auction business at the start and close of trading days. Auctions among other things facilitate rebalances for the massively clogged trend-trading, asset-allocation, ETF and index-mutual-fund complexes, which have exploding in scope but must feed off the same number of nationally traded public companies as existed in 1980.

The bulk of trading profit for exchanges resides in auctions. They charge the same fee for making or taking shares during auctions, instead of rebating half their revenues to attract trades (in order to capture revenue off the consolidated tape) as they do the rest of the day. Plus, they earn about $0.10/100 shares for orders routing out to other markets after a partial fill in the auction.

At BATS, the auction hiccupped. All those “intermarket sweep orders” lined up to get a volume-weighted price in BATS shares and then rush off to another market center to profit on spreads or fill more orders got only 100 shares and then electronically stampeded off the cliff at the Nasdaq where nobody was waiting to take the other side of trades.

Which brings us to what should bother you.

Markets run on math. Calculations can only identify conditions for which they have been programmed. Human beings cannot under existing rules intervene with force and authority to demonstrate the difference between value and growth. Market rules emphatically ordain that the only quotes to be recognized by machines are other automated, machine quotes.

Regulators have decided that their fellow, equal, human beings are incapable of handling bad things and making decisions for themselves, so all markets are connected by law. Thus, any un-carried one in an algorithm over here will infect markets over there, for our own safety. So we have what in the Cold War was called Mutually Assured Destruction, which was also for our safety.

Circuit breakers and connected markets designed to protect humans from their own nature will be their undoing at some unforgettable point. Maybe a Friday.

Or public companies could speak up and insist that markets be disconnected from each other to diffuse risk and that the National Best Bid or Offer be scrapped because everybody ignores it anyway. Those two steps would tamp down the nuclear threat in our markets.

Speaking of rushing headlong, if you’re here in the heartland, join us at the noon NIRI Tri-State chapter meeting today. We’ll talk about what’s got markets hasting.

There’s a saying from the bible: “Like clouds and wind without rain is a man who boasts of a gift he does not give.”

It made me think of volume. Enough of you have written asking about what may underlie declines in market volume that it deserves a community answer. We hope ours will do.

In 1980, Wilshire Associates was tracking about 3,500 publicly traded companies in its index that would become the Wilshire 5000, the category-leading total-market index. The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed that year at 963. Average daily trading volume was 45 million shares on the NYSE.

By 1990, the Wilshire 5000 had over 5,000 companies as IPOs outpaced consolidation. Average daily volume across the NYSE, Nasdaq and American Stock Exchange was 302 million shares, and the Dow Jones Index closed at 2,633.

In 2000, total companies had slipped from the 1998 zenith of 7,460. But daily volume had mushroomed to 2.8 billion shares. The Dow concluded Y2K at 10,786.

Volume built to helium-laughter level of about 7 billion shares daily in 2009. But in 2012 so far, markets are averaging 3.6 billion shares daily. The Dow is up. But the number of public companies is down. Way down. Care to guess how many make up the Wilshire 5000 in 2012?

Focusing on volume, why has it been chop-blocked? Many reasons. Falling volatility. Multi-asset-class trading cannibalizing equity volumes. Money moving to global markets. Fewer prime brokers supporting trading. Tougher rules, fewer trading firms. Fewer brokers. HFT facing regulatory heat.

All are true. But volume is clouds and wind without rain. It exploded because regulators decreed best price the definition of “good competition,” and a system of incentivizing best price built to a fever pitch on shill bids and a grandiose system of filling and digging ditches.

That’s artificial. As substance evaporates from markets, firms will stop competing on price. And volume will decline.

There are 3,675 public companies in the Wilshire 5000. About where were in 1980 when volume on the NYSE was 44 million shares daily.

Sure, there are big, big companies now. Indexes, ETFs, structured products, complex trades with options and futures – and VIX volatility futures and options, which have exploded in popularity, expire today.

But that’s clouds and wind without rain. Volume is a braggadocios giver. It cannot manufacture substance.

So maybe less volume is better.

Just kidding. Mostly.

It’s no joke, however, that trading behaviors can be measured. We said in Market Structure reports for clients this morning: “Broadly, lock-step group behavior means markets are at risk for another move up or down of some magnitude.”

It happened March 13, and may recur this week or later, following options expirations. We’re measuring body language in the crowd behind trading data. If many of its biggest and fastest members break into a jog in the same direction, it’s evident.

Jan Hargrave, expert on what bodies are saying, is coming to Denver in April to visit our NIRI chapter. From the telltale signs of mendacity in somebody’s stance, to ways your body language can help you move from jittery to intrepid, she’s made a business of marking meaning in physical movement. Because actions speak. I’ve not yet heard Jan, but colleagues say she’s fantastic.

We’re mesmerized by extracting meaning from behavior. Well, there’s language in trading behaviors. Erratic, slow, suggestive, fearful – all these manifest differently in trading activity and tell you what money thinks about your shares and the market that surrounds it. If your market structure has folded its arms and crossed its legs in answer to news you just released, it’s potent body language.

But more often than not, the market is caught up in crowd-watching. It likes to hang out near the red carpet trod by the celebrities, such as economic data and central-bank actions. That’s what happened on March 13, when the DOW jumped 218 points. The pupils of the market dilated when the Federal Reserve surveyed its foot soldiers, the primary dealers, and pronounced them fit and sexy.

How? The Fed released “stress test” results for the big banks central – pun intended – to implementing policy initiatives. In telling markets that Behemoth Banks have the resources to do all the things they do – submit bids at Treasury auctions, underwrite hundreds of trillions of notional derivatives value, trade currencies, make markets in bonds and commodities, provide liquidity for equities – the crowd thought the Fed said that love was in the air.

If your stock has been left off the Freeway of Love (one of Jan Hargrave’s books), you may know only through trading behaviors, rather than in changes to ownership. It’s body language.

Stock markets are complex, like human emotions. But trading behavior has its own versions of smiles, frowns and shrugs. It’s not that complicated to understand if you take the time to know what you’re seeing.