We are finally watching Breaking Bad five years after the most successful basic cable series in television history ended.
It’s symbolic of the era that we’re viewing it via Netflix. And NFLX Market Structure Sentiment is bottomed, and shorts have covered. We’ll come to market structure in a moment because it intersects with Breaking Bad.
Launched in 2008, Breaking Bad is about high school chemistry teacher Walter White, who turns to cooking methamphetamine to cover medical bills. He becomes Heisenberg, king of blue meth.
I won’t give the story away but what sets Walter White apart from the rest of the meth manufacturers is his knowledge of molecular structure. Let’s call it Lab Knowledge. With lab knowledge, Walter White concocts a narcotic compound that stuns competitors and the Drug Enforcement Agency alike. He produces it in a vastly superior lab.
In the stock market there’s widespread belief that the recipe for a superior investment compound is the right set of ingredients comprised of financial and operating metrics of businesses.
Same goes for the investor-relations profession, liaison to Wall Street. We’re taught that the key to success is building buyside and sellside relationships around those very same financial and operating metrics.
There’s a recipe. You follow it, and you succeed.
Is anyone paying attention to the laboratory?
The stock market is the lab. Thanks to a total rewriting of the rules of its chemistry, the laboratory has utterly transformed, and the ingredients that underpin the product it churns out now are not the same ones from before.
I don’t mean to toot the ModernIR horn, but we did the one thing nobody else bothered to do. We inspected the lab. We studied the compounds it was using to manufacture the products circulating in the market (ETFs, high-speed trading, etc.).
And we saw that stock pickers were failing because they didn’t understand what the lab was producing. It was not that they’d stopped finding the historically correct chemical elements –financial and operating metrics defining great companies of the past.
It’s that these ingredients by themselves can no longer be counted on to create the expected chemical reaction because the laboratory is compounding differently.
And the difference is massive. The lab determines the outcomes. Write that down somewhere. The lab determines the outcomes. Not the ingredients that exist outside it.
So investors and public companies have two choices. Start a lab that works in the old way. Or learn how the current lab works. The latter is far easier – especially since ModernIR has done the work. We can spit out every manner of scientific report on the ingredients.
Back to market structure, before NFLX reported results it was 10/10 Overbought, over 60% short and Passive money – the primary chemical compound for investments now – was selling. The concoction was destined to blow up.
Everyone blamed ingredients like weaker growth and selling by stock pickers, when those components were not part of the recipe creating the explosion in NFLX. Now, NFLX will be a core ETF manufacturing ingredient, and it will rise.
Investors, what’s in your portfolio? Have you considered the simmering presence of the laboratory in how your holdings are priced? And public companies, do you have any idea what the recipe is behind your price and volume?
If you want to be in the capital markets, you need lab knowledge. Every day, remind yourself that the ingredients you’re focused on may not be the ones the lab is using – and the lab determines the outcome. The lab manufactures what the market consumes.
One of the things we’ll be talking about at the NIRI Southwest Regional Conference is the laboratory, so sign up and join us Aug 22-24 in Austin. Hope to see you there!
