Is index-investing the death knell for investor relations?

According to S&P Dow Jones – which, you REITs, will be breaking out your sector from Financials Aug 31, as will MSCI – over the ten years ended Dec 2015 a staggering 98% of all active investment managers in the USA underperformed the S&P 500.

These outfits are indexers and will make the case for models. But there’s an obvious rub for the profession pitching stories to stock-pickers.  If the folks listening are trailing the benchmarks, investors will move to passive investing.  And they are, in droves. If your team loses all the time, people quit coming to the games.

There’s a tendency in the IR profession to want to shove our heads in the sand about this disturbing condition.  If we can keep quiet, keep doing what we’ve done, maybe the problem will go away or management will remain unaware of it.

That’s no strategy!  Let me gild this trend in gold for the IR profession. Who is our audience?  The money.  Right?  The IR goal is a well-informed market and a fairly valued stock.  So long as you have measures (and we do here at ModernIR!) that will tell you when these conditions exist and how to keep them there, there’s no need for stress at the state of stock-picking.

Make no mistake:  Telling the story will never go away. We need the Active demographic. You have to cultivate a diverse set of styles among stock-pickers. But it can no longer be your sole endeavor. Where 25 years ago the dominant force was bottom-up investing, today’s principal price-setting investment behavior is Asset Allocation – indexes and exchange-traded funds.

Fine! So be it.  The IR profession must adapt.  We’ve seen evolution in the role over the past decade with a swath of public companies giving IR auxiliary duties ranging from communications to financial planning and analysis. Now IR must add data analysis.

Let me explain. If the money is following models, then model the money.  You can’t talk to that sort of investment about what distinguishes you.  Blackrock and Vanguard don’t listen to earnings calls. Who cares? You can track money quantitatively with a great deal more accuracy and a whole lot less work to boot than trooping all over the planet seeing stock-pickers, most of whom will fail to perform as well as SPY, the world’s most actively traded equity – which is a passive investment.

We live in a world where data and technology have converged everywhere from your kitchen to your retirement portfolio. It’s time the IR profession caught up.  Invesco owns PowerShares.  Janus owns VelocityShares. The buyside is adapting. We’d better, too.

So what should you do?  The simplest, easiest and most affordable solution is to use Market Structure Analytics, which we invented to demographically profile all the money driving your equity. You can know every day what percentage of your volume is from Asset Allocation (and three other big behaviors).

Not everyone can, I realize! If nothing else, start today educating your management about ETFs.  Go to alletf.com and find out how many are associated with your shares. Explain that investments of this kind are dominating equity inflows, and consider it a badge of honor if they’ve got more than 5% of your equity collectively.

There’s a lot to grasp about ETFs. And if you’re a longtime reader you know my rub with them: They’re derivatives. Set that aside for now.  Our profession must shift from defense to offense.

It begins with leading management into the equity market we’ve got rather than letting them discover it themselves. They’ll wonder why you didn’t explain it.