While France roasts on both the heat of the US women’s soccer strikers and mother nature’s summertime glow, in Steamboat Springs Lake Catamount sits alpine serene, and it was 46 degrees Fahrenheit (about the same read in Celsius in France) on our early bike ride yesterday.
In the USA, we join figurative thankful hands with you across the fruited plain to mark this amazing republic’s 243rd birthday. Long may the stars and stripes fly.
What’s flying in markets are a bunch of machines.
Joe Saluzzi, one of our marquee panelists at the NIRI Annual Conference last month, spoke to IR Magazine on how the market works and why investor-relations professionals need to educate themselves. As Joe says, much of your volume isn’t investment but trading. It distorts perceptions of real supply and demand.
Why does that matter? Because your board, your executive team, your investors, see your stock as a barometer of fundamentals. You need to know when that’s true – and when it’s not. Misunderstanding what the market is doing can lead to big mistakes.
What if your stock declines sharply with results and management believes it has miscommunicated key messages (and blames you)?
Suppose market structure shows Active money bought in the preceding two weeks – because you’ve been talking regularly over the quarter about what you’re trying to do strategically. Then before the call, they stop buying to pay attention to what you say.
The absence of what had been present will be patently apparent to Fast Traders. They will sell and short you. Whoosh! The flying machines take you down.
Every IRO should understand, and observe, and report internally to the executive team and the board, the starkly apparent data demonstrating these facts. We have that data. For anyone traded in US markets. Including your peers. And yes, you can see that data.
Story is vital, sure. But the way we think about the influence of story, fundamentals, strategy, should be predicated on facts, not a perception diverging from reality.
Illustratively, CNBC ran a headline last Saturday reading “80% of the stock market is now on autopilot.” Referencing a JP Morgan client note, the reporter said about 60% of assets are in passive indexes and Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs), with another 20% following systematic strategies.
An aside, I think Morningstar is behind the curve on measuring the pervasive and endemic shift to passive in stocks. It’s not just assets under management but the composition of volume.
A WSJ article (registration required) last December describing the “herdlike behavior of computerized trading” also quoted JP Morgan officials estimating that 85% of market volume was something other than Active investing.
Those of you using our analytics know we track the facts with precision. Currently, it’s 87%, with just 13% of market volume the past week from Active investment.
Does it render IR obsolete? Of course not! Stop thinking your job consists of talking to investors.
That’s part of the job, sure. But IR is a strategic management function. Your job is to know what all the money is doing, all the time, and communicate important facts about trends and drivers to the board and executives so they’ll have realistic expectations.
And your job is to manage the market for your shares, which includes sorting out what’s controllable and what’s not, and providing important metrics on equity health and drivers around news, earnings, and non-deal road shows – and on a regular basis, proactively, as all good business managers do.
That’s IR today. The market is not full of “noise.” It’s full of flying machines, amazing sensors feeding back vital data to observers like us, who in turn help you take command of the equity-market battlefield as trusted strategic advisor to your executive team.
Ponder that with a cold beer (or a cold Rose from Provence!) and a flag this holiday week. Happy birthday, USA!
