What should you know about your stock, public companies?
Well, what do you know about your business that you can rattle off to some inquiring investor while checking the soccer schedule for your twelve-year-old, replying to an email from the CFO, and listening to an earnings call from a competitor?
Simultaneously.
That’s because you know it cold, investor-relations professionals. What should you know cold about your stock?
While you think about that, let me set the stage. Is it retail money? The Wall Street Journal’s Caitlin McCabe wrote (subscription required) that $28 billion poured to stocks from retail traders in June, sourcing that measure from an outfit called VandaTrack.
If size matters, Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) data from the Investment Company Institute through May is averaging $547 billion monthly, 20 times June retail flows. Alas, no article about that.
You all who tuned to our Meme Stocks presentation last week (send me a note and I’ll share it) know retail money unwittingly depends on two market rules to work.
Illustration 91904354 / Stock Market © Ojogabonitoo | Dreamstime.com
This is good stuff to know but not what I mean. Can you answer these questions?
- How many times per day does your stock trade?
- How many shares at a time?
- How much money per trade?
- What’s the dollar-volume (trading volume translated into money)?
- How much of that volume comes from borrowed stock every day?
- What kind of money is responsible?
- What’s the supply/demand trend?
- What are stock pickers paying to buy shares and are they influencing your price?
Now, why should you know those things? Better, why shouldn’t you know if you can? You might know the story cold. But without these data, you don’t know the basics about the market that determines shareholder value.
Maybe we don’t want to know, Tim.
You don’t want to know how your stock trades?
No, I don’t want to know that what I’m doing doesn’t matter.
What are we, Italians in the age of Galileo? What difference does it make what sets price? The point is we ought to know. Otherwise, we’ve got no proof that the market serves our best interests.
We spend billions of dollars complying with disclosure rules. Aren’t we owed some proof those dollars matter?
Yes. We are. But it starts with us. The evidence of the absence of fundamentals in the behavior of stocks is everywhere. Not only are Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street the largest voting block for public companies and principally passive investors, but the majority of trading volume is executed by intermediaries who are not investors at all.
Stocks with no reason to go up, do. And stock with no reason to go down, do. Broad measures are not behaving like the stocks comprising them. Over the whole market last week, just two sectors had more than a single net buying day: Utilities and Energy. Yet both were down (0.9%, 1.3% respectively). Somehow the S&P 500 rose 1.7%.
You’d think public companies would want to know why the stock market has become a useless barometer.
Let me give you two examples for the questions I asked. Public companies, you should be tracking these data at least weekly to understand changing supply/demand conditions for your shares. And what kind of money is driving shareholder-value.
I won’t tell you which companies they are, but I’ll tweet the answer tomorrow by noon ET (follow @_TimQuast). These are all 5-day averages by the way:
Stock A:
- Trades/day: 55,700
- Shares/trade: 319
- $/Trade: $4,370
- Dollar volume: $243 million
- Short volume percent: 51%
- Behaviors: Active 9% of volume; Passive, 36%; Fast Trading, 32%; Risk Mgmt, 23% (Active=stock pickers; Passive=indexes, ETFs, quants; Fast Trading=speculators, intermediaries; Risk Mgmt=trades tied to derivatives)
- Trend: Overbought, signal predicts a decline a week out
- Active money is paying: $11.60, last in May 2021, Engagement is 94%
Stock B:
- Trades/day: 67,400
- Shares/trade: 89
- $/Trade: $11,000
- Dollar volume: $743 million
- Short volume: 47%
- Behaviors: Active, 8% of volume; Passive, 24%; Fast Trading 49%; Risk Mgmt, 19%
- Trend: Overbought, signal predicts declines a week out
- Active money is paying: $121, last in June 2021, Engagement is 81%
The two stocks have gone opposite directions in 2021. The problem isn’t story for either one. Both have engaged investors. Active money is 8-9%.
The difference is Passive money. Leverage with derivatives.
Would that be helpful to boards and executive teams? Send this Market Structure Map to them. Ask if they’d like to know how the stock trades.
Everybody else in the stock market – traders, investors, risk managers, exchanges, brokers – is using quantitative data. Will we catch up or stay stuck in the 1990s?
We can help.
