We spent last week in Summit County, famous for Breckenridge and Keystone. With windows open and the sun set, the temperature at 9,000 feet drops fast, great for sleeping.
It’s not great for staying awake reading a Kindle but I worked through some exciting pages of Artemis, the new novel by Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian, made into a Ridley Scott movie starring Matt Damon.
And yes, Artemis got me thinking about market structure. Not because of the profanity, the ripping pace, the clever characters, the exotic settings. It’s a book set on the moon, where scientific rules matter.
Weir’s genius is the application of science to clever storylines. On the moon, if you want to commit a crime to save the community, you better understand how to blend acetylene and oxygen in zero atmosphere. Fail to follow or understand the rules, you die.
It’s not life and death in the stock market but rules play the same supreme role in dictating outcomes. If as public companies you think your story will determine the outcome for your stock, the rules will humble you. How much of your trading volume comes from Active Investment? You can and should know – and it’s not what you’d think. But that’s not the point of being public, is it. So don’t be afraid.
If you’re an investor and you think fundamentals will pace you to superior results, think again. The amount of money choosing company financials has plunged, while funds indexing to markets has mushroomed. Rules helping models will eat your lunch.
What rules? Start with Regulation National Market System. It creates a marketplace that forces revenue-sharing among intermediaries. Professional sports like basketball in the USA also operate with rules that shift focus from playing the sport to managing salary cap (Denver just traded three Nuggets for that reason).
If you don’t know this, you’ll have a false understanding of what drives the sport. The “haves” must distribute funds to the “have nots.” Some owners in money-losing markets might choose to skimp on salary to scrape mandated distributions from teams making bank (I wonder what the NBA Cavaliers will do now?).
Right now, stock market sentiment reflecting not the opinions of humans but the ebb and flow of money and the way machines price stocks (the rules, in other words) is topping again as it did about June 12. Options expire today through Friday. So, no matter what you expect as earnings commence, the market will have a propensity to decline ahead.
It’s like the rules on the moon. In one-sixth of earth’s gravity, harsh sun, no atmosphere, success depends on knowing how stuff works. Investors and public companies, welcome to the moon. You can’t treat it like earth. Rules determine outcomes. If your actions don’t account for the rules that govern how markets function, outcomes will reflect it.
But it’s fun on the moon once you know what you’re doing. It’s fun knowing when the market is topped, and bottomed, on rules. It’s fun doing investor-relations when you know what all the money is doing. So, come on up to zero atmosphere! It’s not scary.
