Do stores sell coats in the summer?
No, they sell bathing suits. They match product to consumer. Do you, investor-relations professionals?
I’ll tell you what I mean. First, here’s a tease: I recorded a panel yesterday with the Nasdaq’s Chris Anselmo and Kissell Research Group’s Dr. Robert Kissell on How New Trading Patterns Affect IR.
It airs at 4p ET June 22 during the 2021 NIRI Annual Virtual Conference. Root around in the couch cushions of your IR budget and find some coins and join us. We’ll be taking questions live around the panel. Sling some heckling if you want! It’s a great program.
Now, back to matching product to consumer. The IR outreach strategy for maintaining relationships with investors often resembles a blunderbuss. Unless you went to elementary school when I did and saw pictures of pilgrims sporting guns with barrels shaped like flugelhorns, you probably don’t know what I’m talking about.
You threw some stuff in the barrel and loaded it with powder and ignited it and hoped some of what belched out went in the general direction you were pointing.

Illustration 165213327 © Dennis Cox | Dreamstime.com
If you don’t have anything better I guess it works. But the IR profession shouldn’t be blunderbussing wildly around.
I get it, Tim. Be targeted in our outreach.
No, I mean sell your product to consumers who’ll buy it. Your product is your stock. Your story is a narrative that may or may not match your product.
Huh?
Stay with me. I’ll explain. This is vital.
Think of it this way. REI is an outdoors store. It’ll sell you cycling stuff and camping gear in the summer, and skiing gear and coats in the winter. The data analytics they use are pretty simple: The season changes.
In the stock market, the seasons are relentlessly changing but the temperature doesn’t rise and fall in predictable quadrants to tell you if igloos or swimsuits are in. But the BEHAVIORAL DATA wax and wane like many small seasons.
The Russell 2000 value index is up 30% this year. The Russell 2000 growth index has risen just 3.8%. Is value more appealing than growth? No, as both Benzinga and the Wall Street Journal reported, GME and AMC rank 1-2 in the index.
The crafters of the indices didn’t suppose that movie theaters in the age of Covid or a business built on selling games that have moved online were growth businesses.
They’re not. But the products are. These are extreme cases but it happens all the time.
CVX, market cap $210 billion, is in both Value and Momentum State Street SPDR (S&P Depositary Receipts) Exchange Traded Funds. It’s got both characteristics AT DIFFERENT TIMES.
AAPL, in 299 ETFs, is used for focus value, dividend strategies, technology 3x bull leveraged exposure, high growth, luxury goods, risk-manager and climate-leadership investing, among a vast array of other reasons.
Look up your own stock and see what characteristics are prompting ETF ownership. That’s data you can use. Don’t know what to do? Ask us. We’ll help.
How can ETFs with diametrically opposed objectives use the same stocks? That’s something every investor-relations professional needs to know. ETFs control $6 trillion in the US alone. They’re not pooled investments and they don’t hold custodial accounts like mutual funds.
Should the IR profession understand what the money is doing in the stock market?
Set that aside for now. There’s an immediate lesson to help us stop behaving like blunderbusses. Stocks constantly change. I think rather than targeting specific investors, you should build a big tent of folks you know.
And you should RECONNECT with them in highly specific, data-driven ways. If you just call investors you know to follow up, you’re doing IR like a cave man. Stop doing that.
The deck is already stacked against investors focused on story. They need all our help they can get! I’ve explained it many times. Rules promote average prices and harm outliers. Passives want average prices. Stock pickers want outliers.
If we want investors interested in our stories to succeed, use DATA to help them.
Like this. We met with a Financials component yesterday. The data show a big surge in Passive money in patterns. You won’t see it in settlement data. It never leaves the custodian because it the same money moving from indexes to ETFs and back.
But ModernIR can see it in near realtime.
The IR department should be calling core GROWTH names, even though it’s a value story. That wave of Passive money is going to lift the stock. Growth money buys appreciation. Value money buys opportunity.
You want to move from blunderbuss to data expert in modern markets? Ask us. You don’t have to be way behind like the Russell indices. You can be way ahead, like a modern IRO.
Get rid of that blunderbuss, pilgrim.