You’ve got to know what to measure.
Every time I interact with anybody from an airline to my company’s communications providers, I get a survey. “How’d we do?”
It drives me crazy. It’s like Claymation customer service: Move something, take a picture. Move something, take a picture. You’ve seen clay animation? Wallace & Gromit popularized cartoonish clay caricature (and cheese!). Each picture contributed to forming movement and emotion. Every snapshot is feedback that when viewed together become the story. It works in cartoons but isn’t a good customer-service model.
We’re inundated with market information in the investor-relations profession. The feedback loop is so intensive that it can somewhere morph from meaningful to white noise. You don’t know what you’re measuring or hearing. The sequence of snapshots doesn’t translate to meaningful film. There’s no narrative in the data.
Back when I was in the IR chair, I’d hear all the time that we’d broken through moving averages. Initially, I exclaimed, “Oh!” and added, “Thank you!” It was only later that I realized moving averages told me little and certainly weren’t entertaining like Claymation. What should I tell management? “Unfortunately, there’s been a breakdown in our moving averages, prompting a sharp shift in perception.”
Really?
Here’s another metric that confuses busy with productive. We have clients with high short interest. The measure derives from a 1974 regulation from The Federal Reserve to track borrowing in marginable securities accounts as part of aggregate money supply.
Borrowing is a good measure of risk. To that end, if you’re interested in a riotous three-minute explanation of what’s wrong in Europe, click here (it’s a video clip so be appropriately prepared).
But what if we’re not measuring borrowing correctly? Short volume, or trading with borrowed shares instead of owned shares, is roughly 43% of the total market. This measure wasn’t created by the Fed in 1974. It’s current. It’s Claymation. We’ve studied short interest and short volume and found that the former often is inversely correlated with price-movements, suggesting that it’s a lagging indicator of risk (and thus a lousy one). Not so with short volume.
The ownership measure extant today, 13Fs, was created in 1974 as well. It’s deplorable as feedback on institutional behavior, coming 90 trading days after it might have occurred. Today, over $1.7 trillion of assets are held by Exchange-Traded Funds that post ownership positions daily, yet trades clear “T+3,” or potentially four days out.
Do you think about these things in the IR chair? Perception is, “Our price continuously reflects rational thought.” Reality is something else, demonstrably and statistically. Speaking of which, I’m hoping to take the NIRI Arizona chapter on a rollicking safari through market structure today. Process is more influential than purpose.
What you don’t want to do with your IR forensics is confuse busy with productive. You can track vast seas of data that neither offer narrative nor animate it. What’s the right feedback mechanism? Reality! What is money doing right now and what’s the likely impact in the future, and what’s that mean to actions in my IR program and what I communicate to management?
There’s a simple answer every day. If you don’t have it yet, we’ll show you the clay. It’s really quite fun!
