What did you say yesterday to your executive team, investor-relations officers, if you’d sent a note Monday about mounting Coronavirus fears?
The market zoomed back, cutting losses in the S&P 500 to about 2% since Jan 17. We said here in the Market Structure Map Jan 22 that data on market hedges that expired Jan 17 suggested stocks could be down about 2% over the proceeding week.
It’s been a week and stocks were down 2%. (If you want to know what the data say now, you’ll have to use our analytics.)
The point is, data behind prices and volume are more predictive than headlines.
NIRI, the professional association for IR, last year convened a Think Tank to examine the road ahead, and the group offered what it called The Disruption Opportunity.
If we’re to become trusted advisors to executive teams and boards, it won’t be through setting more meetings with stock-pickers but by the strategic application of data.
For instance, if Passive investment powering your stock has fallen 30% over the past 200 trading days, your executive team should know and should understand the ramifications. How will IR respond? What’s controllable? What consequences should we expect?
At a minimum, every week the executive team should be receiving regular communication from IR disruptors, a nugget, a key conclusion, about core trends driving shareholder value that may have nothing to do with fundamentals.
Take AAPL, which reported solid results yesterday after the market closed. AAPL is the second most widely held stock in Exchange Traded Funds (there’s a nugget). It’s over 20% of the value of the Tech sector, which in turn is nearly 24% of the S&P 500, in turn 83% of market-capitalization.
AAPL is a big engine (which for you cyclists is American rider Tejay van Garderen’s nickname). And it always mean-reverts.
It may take time. But it’s as reliable as Rocky Mountain seasons – because the market is powered today by money that reverts to the mean. Over 85% of S&P 500 volume is something other than stock-picking.
AAPL has the widest mean-reversion gap in a half-decade now, with Passive investment down a third in the last week. AAPL trades over 30 million shares daily, about $10 billion of stock. And 55% of that – 17 million shares, $5.5 billion of dollar volume – is on borrowed shares.
Those factors don’t mean AAPL is entering a mean-reversion cycle. But should the executive team and the board know these facts? Well, it sure seems so, right?
And investors, would it behoove you to know too?
The Russell 1000 is 95% of market cap, the Russell 3000, over 99.9%. That means we all own the same stocks. You won’t beat the market by owning stocks someone else doesn’t.
How then will you win? I’m coming to that.
IR pros, you’re the liaison to Wall Street. You need to know how the market works, not just what your company does that differs from another. If your story is as good as somebody else’s but your stock lags, rather than rooting through the financials for reasons, look at the money driving your equity value.
Take CRM. Salesforce is a great company but underperformed its industry and the S&P 500 much of the past year – till all at once in the new year it surged.
There’s no news. But behaviors show what caused it. ETF demand mushroomed. CRM is in over 200 ETFs, and the S&P 500. For a period, ETFs could get cheap CRM stock to exchange into expensive SPY shares, an arbitrage trade. The pattern is stark.
Now that trade is done. CRM market structure signals no imminent swoon but Passive demand is down over 20% because there’s no profit in the CRM-for-ETFs swap now.
That fact is more germane to CRM’s forward price-performance than its financials.
This, IR pros, is your disruption opportunity in the c-suite. If you’re interested in seeing your market structure, ask and we’ll give you a free report.
Investors, your disruption opportunity isn’t in what you own but when you buy or sell it. Supply and demand rule that nexus, and we can measure it. If you’d like to know about Market Structure EDGE, ask us.
