Spotify ditched convention yesterday with its direct listing on the NYSE. It didn’t raise money or ring the opening bell. It gave shareholders a way out. It’s a touchstone for the state of the capital markets.
CrunchBase says Spotify has raised $2.6 billion in 22 funding rounds in private markets where you don’t have to file 10-Ks and 10-Qs and fight proxy battles, meet a rising sea of disclosures from the impact of your business on the environment to how much more the CEO makes than the janitor.
No high-frequency traders. No passive investors ignoring your fundamentals but browbeating you over governance. No worrying about meeting expectations that somebody will game by spread-trading you versus the VIX. No analyst models to tussle over. No scripts or contentious Q&A over quarterly results. No Activists.
Spotify cut out all the banks save two to help with pricing and a bit of secondary market-making and let holders sell shares through a broker via the NYSE node on the market’s network and now they can trade anywhere. Welcome to the new age.
It’s more proof of the decline and fall of the sellside, source of brokerage research. In the past 20 years, it’s been buffeted by a series of body blows:
-The Order Handling Rules in the late 1990s commenced a shift from valuable information to speed in trading markets.
–Decimalization in 2001 gutted the intermediary margin paying for sellside analysts.
-Elliott Spitzer’s 2003 Global Settlement forcibly separated research from trading and with it went the glory era of the all-star sellside analyst and in its place came the age of trading technology.
-In 2007, Regulation National Market System transformed the stock market into a frenetic, automated blitzkrieg where competing markets are forced to share customers and prices, and market structure overtook story as price-setter, dealing another dire setback to analyst research.
-Over the ensuing decade with now prices made to trade at averages (the mandatory best-bid-and-offer model from Reg NMS imposed midpoints, averages, on the stock market), trillions of dollars dropped the sellside, shifting from information as key to beating benchmarks, to technology for tracking benchmarks, and average became better than superior.
Today Exchange Traded Funds, derivatives of underlying stock assets, drive 50% of market volume and have no connection to differentiating research. Blackrock, Vanguard and State Street have slashed active investment (and brokerage research), and most of their $13 trillion in combined assets follow models tracking benchmarks.
What’s all this got to do with Spotify? If form follows function, Spotify is the future. The function of the stock market isn’t capital formation anymore. That happens in private equity. Public markets are an exit strategy, where stocks go to trade. It’s what you do at the end of the beginning, so to speak, to give the first money in a way out.
Private equity is still built on vital information and differentiation, not averages. There is a vibrant and thriving capital market out there, but it’s not the stock market.
The stock market is a place to trade things. It’s what ETFs facilitate – arbitraging everything toward a mean. You don’t need banks and bells and big road trips to make things tradable. You just need a node on the network. We’ll see more of it, I’m sure.
I wonder why we’re consuming so much time and energy on corporate disclosure if so much of the money ignores it. ETFs offer Summary Prospectuses because nobody reads the prospectuses. What about a Summary 10-Q? What about a slimline 10-K?
Let me be blunt: Why are public companies spending billions on disclosure if half the market volume is machines trading things? Isn’t that a waste of money?
These are questions somebody should be answering.
It should affect how we think about the skill set for investor relations in the future. Everything is data today. If you ride a bike, you’ve got data analytics. Post a job via LinkedIn? Data analytics. The IR people of tomorrow should be data analysts, not just storytellers. Quantify, track and trend the money, whether it follows the story or not.
We can’t stay back in the 1990s talking to a failing sellside. Spotify didn’t. And it’s the future, a streaming market.
