What can you control?
Courtesy IEX
It’s a question largely abandoned in the modern era under the assumption humans can control everything. Arrogance often precedes experience-induced humility.
But we’re talking specifically about the stock market. Public companies. Share-performance. Investor relations. What’s within your sphere of influence?
There’s a big difference between your capacity to drive shareholder value rationally in a quantitative market – and the value you provide internally to your board and executive team about what depends on story, and what turns on the product, your shares.
I’ll talk in practical terms about it Thursday at the NIRI Chicago 2020 IR Workshop, the first virtual edition. Join us for the event! I’m on about 1:30pm ET Thursday the 24th.
Market structure plays a key role. Supply and demand affect stocks the same way they do products in any market. Yet the supply of product – shares – is almost never a consideration for public companies and investor-relations professionals, who suppose that telling the story to more investors will create volume and drive the price up.
Our friends at IEX here explain the difference between volume and liquidity (and we described liquidity and volatility last week). The more parties between the sources of supply and demand, the more volume compounds (especially with derivatives, leverage via borrowing, Exchange Traded Funds).
But volume doesn’t create more supply of the product. This by the way is how stocks soar and lurch today (we touched on it last week).
SHOP, the big Canadian e-commerce company, saw shares plummet about 30% in a week on a share-offering. The stock then skyrocketed yesterday. Shares were trading near $1,140 to start September, fell to $850 after the news, and were near $960 yesterday.
Rational thought?
No, supply and demand. SHOP is the 7th most liquid stock in the US market (a reason why we cluster it with close cousins the FAANGs). In fact, supply is so tight in SHOP that it depends on borrowed stock.
Most times stocks with high short volume – borrowed shares – underperform the market. Shorting adds supply to the market. If demand falls, short volume weighs on price.
Short volume is at a basic level rented inventory. Traders who deal shares in fractions of seconds rent stocks to sell to others, profiting on the differences in price. At some point before the close they buy it back and return it, aiming to make more getting between buyers and sellers – see the IEX video – than they spend renting stocks and covering that borrowing.
In SHOP, the demand has been so great that even high shorting isn’t dragging the price down. They’re an outlier, and edge case (and that data clearly indicate they can afford to continue issuing stock, by the way). There’s more to be made trading SHOP every day than the cost of constantly covering borrowed shares.
Disrupt that supply chain with a stock offering and the whole SHOP market for shares shudders.
That’s why it’s essential for investor-relations professionals to help executives and boards understand what’s controllable. If your market capitalization is less than roughly $4 billion, you’re outside where 95% of the money plays, which is in the Russell 1000.
You can either get bigger and get into the top thousand, come up with something that makes you a screaming growth play that’ll compound your trading and limited liquidity into $4 billion of market cap – or set realistic internal expectations for your team.
Data can help you make a difference with your liquidity. Use it to time your outreach to investors. Aiming to attract buyers when it’s 62% short – unless you’re SHOP – is wasting time. Wait till liquidity improves.
I’ll use a great example to kick off the Chicago discussion tomorrow. And if you’re on hand live and we have the data, I’ll tell you your liquidity ranking.
Bottom line, IR should be captaining liquidity. You’re the chief intelligence officer. Supply and demand determine your price. Know your liquidity. Ask us, and we’ll help.
