Market Structure Insights
January 25, 2017
“Our stock dropped because Citi downgraded us today.” So said the investor-relations chief for a technology firm last week during options-expirations. For thirty years, this has been the intonation of IR. “We’re moving on the Goldman upgrade.” “UBS lifted its target price, and shares are...
January 18, 2017
How many of you wear a Fitbit? I remember the last time I saw Jeff Morgan, erstwhile NIRI CEO. I said, “Jeff, you’ve lost weight. You’re a lean machine!” He tapped his wrist, and said, “Fitbit. You can appreciate it, Tim. It’s just measuring data,...
January 11, 2017
Last Sunday treated us to a picture-perfect Santa Monica day. We were there helping investor-relations folks at the NIRI Fundamentals conference understand the stock market. Of it, you probably won’t say to your CFO, “I bet you have no idea how our stock trades.” But...
January 4, 2017
I hit a nerve. What sparked the tempest was my assertion last week that investor-relations professionals can’t be just storytellers when over 80% of trading is not Active investment. (For you investors, it’s why stock-picking is performance-challenged.) It’s not that respondents raged against the machines...
December 28, 2016
“Making investment decisions by looking solely at the fundamentals of individual companies is no longer a viable investment philosophy.” So said Steve Eisman, made famous in Michael Lewis’s book The Big Short, upon shutting down his new investment fund in 2014. Actor Steve Carrell portrayed...
December 21, 2016
The whole market is behaving as though it’s got an Activist shareholder. In a sense it does. More on that in a minute. We track the effects of Activism on trading and investment behaviors both before it’s widely known and afterward. A hallmark of these...