“What’s eye are? I haven’t seen that acronym.”
So said a friend unfamiliar with this arcane profession at public companies responsible for Wall Street relationships. IR, for you investors who don’t know, is the role that coordinates earnings calls and builds the shareholder base behind traded shares.
Investor Relations is a vocation in transition because of the passive tide sweeping investment, money that can’t be actively built into a shareholder base. Money in models is deaf to persuasion. The IR job is Story. The market more and more is Structure.
But IR underestimates its power. There’s a paradox unfolding in the capital markets. I liken it to shopping malls and Amazon. Used to be, people flocked to department stores where earnest clerks matched people to products.
We still do it, sure. But nowadays seas of cash slosh onto the web and over to Amazon without a concierge. It’s passive shopping. It’s moved by what we need or want and not by service, save that Amazon is expert at getting your stuff in your hands well and fast.
“You were saying we underestimate our power,” you reply, IR pro. “How?”
You’ve seen the Choice Hotels ad? A guy with an authoritative voice declares that the Choice people should use four words: “Badda-book, badda-boom.”
The advertisement is humorously stereotyping the consultants, high-powered and high-paid pros who arrive on corporate premises to, buttressed by credibility and prestige, instruct managers on what they must do.
Whether it’s marketing and communications or management like McKinsey & Co., they command psychological currency because of real and perceived credibility, and confident assertion.
Might these people be buffaloing us? There’s probably some of that. But the point is they command respect and value with authority and expertise.
All right, apply that to IR. Especially now, with the profession in a sort of identity crisis. It’s become the ampersand role. You’re head of IR &…fill in the blank. Strategy. Corporate Development. Treasury. Financial Planning & Analysis. Communications.
The ampersand isn’t causing the crisis. It’s the money. Bloomberg reporters following the passive craze say indexes and Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) may surpass active stock funds soon for assets under management.
They already crush stock-pickers as price-setters. Passive investment is nearly twice as likely to set your price every day as your story. Buy and hold money buys and holds. Your story isn’t changing daily. But prices are. Sentiment is. Macro factors are. Risk is. These and more breed relentless shifting in passive behavior, especially ETFs.
And here’s the IR powerplay. You are the authoritative voice, the badda-book badda-boom on capital markets internally. With the behavior of money changing, you’re in the best position to be the expert on its evolution. To lead.
If you were the management consultant, you would lay out a plan and benchmarks for organizational transformation. If you were the widget product manager, you’d be providing executives regular data on the widget market and its drivers. You wouldn’t wait for the CEO to say, “Can you pull data together on what’s happening with widgets?”
Sometimes IR people pride themselves on how management never asks about the stock. If you’re the expert, silence is not your friend. Get out in front of this transformation and lead it. Don’t let them watch the stock, but help them consistently measure it.
What set of vital facts about passive investment should your management team understand? If you don’t have answers, insist on the resources needed to get them.
Don’t be timid. Don’t wait for management to say, “We want you to study and report back.” It’s too late then. You’ve moved from the expert to the analyst.
Instead, set the pace. See it as a chance to learn to use analytics to describe the market. Make it a mission to wield your IR power as this passive theme changes our profession.
And we’ll catch you in two weeks! We’re off to ride the tides on the Belizean reef, a weeklong Corona commercial catamaraning the islands. We’ll report back.
As we leave, Market Sentiment has again bottomed so stocks rose with Monday’s MSCI rebalances and probably rise through expirations Wed-Fri before mean-reverting again. How many mean-reversions can a bull market handle?
