It’s 8am Eastern Time and you’re in a conference room. Earnings season.
Executives around the table. The serious ones in suits and ties like usual. Others in shorts or jeans. Everybody reading the call script one more time.
“You think we’ll get that question about inventory levels?” the COO says.
“What’s the stock gonna do today?” says your CEO.
All of us who’ve been in the investor-relations chair understand the quarterly grind. We practice, prepare, canvass probable questions, rehearse answers. Try to get the execs to read the script aloud. We listen to competitors’ calls, seeking key queries.
Yet 85% of the volume in the market is driven by money paying no attention to calls.
“Not during earnings,” you say. “Active money is the lead then.”
If it is, that’s a victory. It’s an anecdotal observation rather than hard statistical fact, but my experience with the data suggests less than 20% of public companies have Active money leading as price-setter on earnings days.
I’m reminded of a classic example. One of our clients had screaming Sentiment – 10/10 on our index, slamming into the ceiling – and 68% short volume ahead of results. We warned that without the proverbial walk-off grand slam, nothing would stop a drop.
Active money led, setting a new Rational Price, our measure of fair value, though shares closed down. In proceeding days the stock lost 8%. It wasn’t the story. It was the sector. Tech tanked. And shorting. And Sentiment.
Which leads us back to the carefully crafted earnings call. We’ve got a variety of clients with Activist investors, and I’ll give you two sharply contrasting outcomes that illustrate the importance of the answer to both your COO’s and CEO’s questions.
One has been slashing and burning expenses (it’s what you do when somebody horns in with money and personality). Still, heading into the call shorting was 69% and investors were wary. The company has a history of sharp pullbacks on results.
The only bull bets were from machines that leveraged hard into shares. No thought, just a calculated outcome.
Did you see the Wall Street Journal article yesterday on a massive VIX bet? Some anonymous trader has wagered about $265 million that the VIX will be over 25 in October. The trader could win big or lose big.
It’s the same thing. Traders, both humans and machines, bet on volatility, exacerbated by results. Fast Traders wagered our client would jump about 8% (we could forecast it). They were right. The buying that drove initial response came from quantitative money. Machines read the data and bought, and shorting dropped 20% in a day.
Rational investors have since been profit-takers. Price moved so much on bets that buy-and-hold money turned seller.
In the other instance, price fell 15%. Risk Management was 15% of market capitalization ahead of the call because Activism tends to boost the value of the future – reflected in derivatives. But Activists have short attention spans. If you’re two quarters in without any meaningful catalyst, you’re asking for trouble.
Well, that was apparent in the data. They were 60% short every day for 50 days ahead of results, the equivalent of a tapping foot and a rolling eye. If you don’t give that audience a catalyst they’re going to take their futures and forwards and go home.
Results missed and management guided down, and ALL of that 15% came out of market cap. Investors didn’t sell? No. How does it help long money to sell and slaughter price? They’d wreck months or years of commitment in a minute.
But the future was marked to zero because event-driven money dropped its rights to shares. And 15% of market cap held that way vanished.
The degree of uncertainty in all prices, not just ones at earnings season, are increasing because machines are betting on volatility, long and short, price-spreads.
It’s not rational. It’s gambling. Moral of the story? Prepare well, yes. But prepare proportionally. Keep it simple. A minority of the money listens now and cannot overcome the power of arbitrage (we need a better market. Another story.).
You might recoil at the idea. But if the market has changed, shouldn’t we too? Correlate outcomes to effort. Learn market structure. Measure the money. Set expectations. Prepare. But prepare wisely. Efficiently. Don’t confuse busy with productive.
For your COO, the answer is yes, we’ll get that question, and for your CEO, the answer probably has no bearing on how shares will behave. Keep the answer short. (And yes, we can forecast how shares will behave and what will set price. Ask us.)
