It’s good to get yourself a long way away from things. You might find you’ve been missing the forest for the trees.
So we’re in Europe, halfway through our longest junket away from Clyde the Cavalier (great name for a medieval court jester but he’s a hound dog). Thank you to our friends and family babysitting him!
This photo is us with gracious Basel hosts Kevin and Tammy (and fabulous hound dog Dakota) in the Alps in Kandersteg, Switzerland. A panorama will change your perspective.
Photo courtesy Tim Quast. Kandersteg Switzerland.
Here’s a perspective. US stocks swooned Monday into the close. I read it was Apple slowing hiring. Somebody made that up, a correlation unsupported by math.
A tree in the forest.
The algorithms we write, machines crunching data like the Roomba lawn mower on its programmed rounds at Castello di Spaltenna in Gaiole Italy where we stayed last week, said this about S&P 500 stocks:
Down 7% on selling tied to derivatives like options. Sentiment signals gains, while short volume is up 1% and above the 5-day, 20-day, 50-day and 200-day trend.
It means stocks fell 7% the past week through Monday on derivatives like options. That fits the context. It’s more panoramic than you think. Options expired and reset. I didn’t read a word in any business media about lapsing and resetting options.
And Short Volume, the supply chain of the stock market, is above trailing averages. In fact, it’s 49% of trading volume. That’s a 1% spread between long and short volume.
And while Sentiment now signals gains (as we saw Tuesday), a backlog in the supply chain will mute them.
Public companies and investors, THIS is seeing the whole forest, not a random tree.
Yeah, you say. But I can’t control it.
Controlling outcomes is an illusion. It was possible when 80% of the volume and 90% of the assets were focused on Story. You could court the buyside and sellside and separate yourself.
That was 20 years ago.
Now, the new money in the market is Passive, and large-cap Passive is the biggest asset category, and 90% of the volume is doing something other than buying and selling Story.
Stocks fell Monday because the cost for using substitutes and hedges rose, so demand for new derivatives Monday was down. Lower implied demand hurt prices.
The market is a Roomba running around on a programmed path, demarcated by options-expirations, the ebb and flow of passive money, machines sifting the price data.
What about earnings? Sure, those affect programmed activity, rather as the lawnmower Roomba at Spaltenna runs in planned circles around swales to even out the grass.
But they’re not the determinants of whether stocks rise or fall. The Roomba running in circles is.
Discouraging? No, a fact. Do we want to matter, or become obsolete? Ignoring reality is not a strategy for promoting occupational longevity.
Someone asked the online investor-relations community for advice on which investment conferences to attend to garner analyst research (what’s called sellside coverage).
The company has $18 million of market cap. It doesn’t trade enough to generate a return for any market-making desk. Seeking coverage is missing the forest for the trees.
But you know what happened:
CEO: “Get us into some conferences. Get some analyst coverage.”
IRO: “Yes.”
Among the trees, you don’t see how the market works. It’s the investor-relations officer’s job to know, though. You can’t provide sound counsel if you don’t.
What should that company do? Well, 99.8% of the money in the stock market is in larger stocks. The IR person should give the team and the Board a clear-eyed view:
- Take the company private.
- Merge with others in the industry to create the largest player possible.
- Keep doing what we’re doing but it won’t matter.
Those are the unvarnished facts. You can’t create shareholder value by telling the Story, because that’s not what drives most of the money. You’ll never come to understand what you can and cannot do as a public company without first getting above the trees, seeing the whole picture.
If you’re a serious public company, the roadmap to all the things you want – coverage, share
holder value, liquidity – is understanding how the market works and what the money is doing and figuring out how to get in front of it.
And that’s simple: Size. Have a strategy for joining the 20 largest companies in your industry or sector.
That’s the view from up here. With that, we’re off to Zermatt (in fact, I’m writing on the train)! Catch you in a couple weeks after we’ve ridden bikes through the Alps.
