I probably liked Jay Woods best.

We’re back in the mountains after a junket to Chicago for the NIRI Annual Conference, where the joy is seeing our clients, colleagues and friends. Have been there some 25 times and it never gets old.

And I thought Jay Woods had a standout session. He wrapped the day Monday in the 430p slot when everybody is thinking about happy hour, and he managed to hold the whole general session for the hour. Nobody walked out.

Jay is a certified market technician. I have long poked fun at technicians. Tiger chief Julian Robertson called technicals “hocus-pocus, mumbo-jumbo BS.” I asked the global head of data products for Interactive Brokers, “How many rich technical traders do you know?”

After a pause, he said, “Three. No, four.” 

Eighty percent of retail trading tools are technical. There are millions of retail traders. You get it. 

But Jay Woods killed it. He canvassed the stock market in such an approachable and engaging way that at the end, American Water Works IR head Aaron Musgrave and I looked at each other and said at the same time, “That was good!” 

Why did it work? Because he explained the stock market in layman’s terms. He took all our questions. Down-to-earth guy, is Jay. 

In other Annual Conference news, the most perplexing may be tokenization.  It’s coming, and evidence abounds. Bullish bought one of the big former shareholder-services houses in recent weeks.  Computershare has got an initiative with Securitize in the works. 

You might be saying, as 100% of our respondents in our informal walkaround poll did, “What the heck is tokenization?”

I get the idea. I’ve long thought brokers, the DTCC, Broadridge and transfer agents were a lot of intermediating layers.  The only more intermediated market, so far as I’m aware, is stock-trading (where 50% of volume is middlemen).

Tokens effectively eliminate the middleman. You and I can trade them in our digital wallets. Now, don’t lose that wallet! But you don’t need a bunch of settlement, transfer, clearing, etc., layers. 

It’s why the transfer-agent business is rushing to do tokenization deals.

I’m for disintermediation. The problem is Congress legislated a “national market system” (under what Constitutional authority I don’t know but why worry about the Constitution now?) in 1975. The 1970s gave us much of what still prevails, from Short Interest, to 13Fs, to quarterly reporting (and yes, the shift to semiannual reporting took the stage too).

Thirty years later in 2005, the SEC implemented Regulation National Market System to conform to Congress’s wishes. The problem with regulation is it’s often thirty years behind.

That’s not the point.

The point is we have a stock market that’s a giant data network with a bunch of rules where every trade is intermediated by brokers.

Cutting out that middleman could be the best idea ever. But it contradicts the law and the rules.

Yet SEC chair Paul Atkins, the first head of the SEC to speak at NIRI in a long time, suggested in his comments that tokenization might be permitted via “regulatory exemption.”

You’d have to exempt tokens from Reg NMS. So why have Reg NMS?

Another big topic is impending 23/5 trading, which I’ve written about before. There is a rush by stock exchanges to offer overnight trading because they’ve lost half their business to platforms like Blue Ocean already facilitating round-the-clock trading.

There are many unanswered questions. Trading halts and resumptions? Volatility girders? Order Protection? Order routing? Reference prices for mutual funds? The release of material nonpublic information? Relevance of opening and closing auctions?

There’s seems to be a propensity to brush off these matters and say, “We’ll figure it out.” 

And my Express Talk on Rethinking Earnings to Attract and Keep Passive Money was a packed-house hit. Most didn’t know you can control quite a lot to make your stock more appealing to Passive money.

A bunch of people said to me, “I’d never thought about the timing of my earnings release – like reporting when 90% of volume is trading.”

“I’d never considered that Active money is a seller, not a buyer.”

“I didn’t know I could have a Product Strategy and a Story strategy.”

“I’d never thought about my characteristics.”

“Never thought about speed-bumping machines by stripping machine-readable data from our earnings release.”

“I’d never considered that buying back our stock is competing with Passives and the $75 billion a month they spend on equities.” (Which is the size of a SpaceX IPO every month.)

Investor-relations folks, you can’t control business execution, global macro factors, wars and rumors of wars. You can control only WHEN you report. Don’t report after the close! Want to know more? Ask us. 

Do things that matter to Passives. It’s how to drive shareholder returns.

And finally, there is upheaval in the IR services business around all these things. It may be an interesting conclusion to 2026. 

And not just because SpaceX, Anthropic and ChatGPT are pelting toward their private exits just as the AI trade seems to be hitting turbulence.

You should see the data. If you don’t have it, ask us. ModernIR owns the Market Structure turf in US equity markets.