“Looking good, Valentine!” “Feeling good, Louis!” A gentleman’s bet. But maybe not so fast.

Farce met Street last week with good reason distracting many in the Finance and public company arenas. Far better chronicled elsewhere (here a good one on Benzinga’s Monday Pre-Market Prep – pls skip the clunky ad), but this weekend I couldn’t resist the parallels to 1983’s Trading Places – I’ll leave you to Twitter, your browser or favorite streaming service and bring the focus to Market Structure.

With all rights to Messrs. Russo, Landis, Harris, Weingrod, Aykroyd, Murphy, Ms. Curtis and Paramount, et al.

We start February with a significant percentage of our clients yet to report quarterly and year-end results and to confirm their forward-looking expectations. Tough challenge in a Market seemingly growing more disinterested.

No question your IR team is working long hours with counselors and non-public facing finance, accounting and marketing coworkers to develop a cogent, clear message, to tie-out results and craft outlook statements and public disclosures; all too often, a thankless job.

It doesn’t help that the Market and the trading in individual equities are seemingly chaotic and unpredictable. But are they? As a subscriber you’re likely conversant in Market Structure – our view of the Market here at ModernIR (if no, read on and please reach out to our Zach Yeager to set up a demo). So like the polar bear swimmers here in Minnesota let’s dive in – we’ll be quick.

Here’s how the Market has evolved in the first month of 2021 – changes in the demographics of trading:

Note the Passive Investment retreat – would have been fair to expect the opposite with all the month-end true-ups for ETFs, Index and Quant Funds – but it’s a repeating month-end behavior recently followed by buying. The surge of volatility arose from increased Fast Trading – machine-driven High Frequency trading, and yes, some Retail day trading.

Both categories are largely populated by algorithmically driven trading platforms; “Passive” (a largely  anachronistic designation – and far from it or the buy and hold strategies the name conjures) today constantly recalibrate collateral holdings with dominate behaviors suggesting little long-term primary focus. “Fast Trading” – pure execution speed, volume-based trading; its goal beyond vast incremental profits – no overnight balance sheet exposure.

Short Volume trading rather than building, declined and Sentiment remained persistently positive (5.0 = Neutral) and never negative. Does this sound disorganized? For forces dominating early Q1/21 equity trading this was a strong, dynamic and likely very profitable period.

The cruel truth – machine trading is no gentlemen’s bet. Brilliant in execution, these efforts have one goal – to game inherent trading advantages over slower moving Market participants – folks that demand conference calls, executive time, build and tie-out spreadsheet models and trade in non-Market-disruptive fashion – the traditional IR audience. The system rewards this – topic for another time.

From a pure trading standpoint, traders behind 9 out 10 trades in the final day of January trading placed minimal value on traditional IR efforts as their bots rocket through Short Seller reports and quarterly management call transcripts, scan real-time news feeds and playbacks for tradable intonation in your executives’ delivery and make mathematical judgments about the first 100 words of each press release.

As IR professionals its incumbent that we, rather than be demoralized by the evolution and dominance of short-term trading, engage, and become intimately versed in these data and these Market realities. The competitive advantage is in understanding and minimizing false conclusions in decision-making. Management and the constituents of long-term investors – yes, they are still legion – and expect no less.

Let us show you how.

Perry Grueber filling in for Tim Quast