Public companies, are you still reporting financial results like it’s 1995?
Back then, Tim Koogle and team at Yahoo! made it a mission to be first, showing acuity at closing the books for the quarter faster than the rest. Thousands turned out for the call and – a whiz-bang new thing – webcast.
Ah, yesteryear and its influence. It’s still setting time for us all. No, really. Benjamin Franklin penned a 1784 letter to a Parisian periodical claiming his experiments showed sunlight was available the moment the sun rose and if only Parisians could get out of bed earlier instead of rising late and staying up, they could save immense sums on candles.
Some say his levity gave rise to the notion of Daylight Savings Time. A closer look suggests it was the Canadians. Sure, scientist George Hudson of the Wellington Philosophical Society presented an 1895 paper saying New Zealand would improve its industry by turning clocks forward two hours in October, back two in March.
But the occupants of Thunder Bay in northern Ontario first shifted time forward in 1908.
What do Canada and New Zealand have in common besides language and erstwhile inclusion in a British empire upon which the sun never set? They’re at extreme latitudes where light and dark swing mightily.
The push to yank clocks back and forth swept up much of the planet during World War I in an effort to reduce fuel-consumption.
Here in Denver we’re neither at war and hoarding tallow nor gripping a planetary light-bending polar cap in mittened hands. So why do we cling to an anachronistic practice?
Speaking of which, in 1995 when the internet throngs hung on every analog and digital word from the Yahoo! executive fearsome foursome (at least threesome), most of the money in the market was Active Investment. That was 24 years ago.
Back then, investor-relations pros wanted to be sellside analysts making the big bucks like Mary Meeker and Henry Blodget. Now the sellsiders want to be IR pros because few hang on its words today like it was EF Hutton and the jobs and checks have gone away.
Volume is run by machines. The majority of assets under management are Passive, paying no attention to results. Three firms own nearly 30% of all equities. Thousands of Exchange Traded Funds have turned capital markets into arbitrage foot races that see earnings only as anomalies to exploit. Fast Traders set most of the bids and offers and don’t want to own anything. And derivatives bets are the top way to play earnings.
By the way, I’m moderating a panel on market structure for the NIRI Virtual Chapter Nov 20 with Joe Saluzzi and Mett Kinak. We’ll discuss what every IRO, board member and executive should understand about how the market works.
Today 50% of trades are less than 100 shares. Over 85% of volume is a form of arbitrage (versus a benchmark, underlying stocks, derivatives, prices elsewhere).
Active Investment is the smallest slice of daily trading. Why would we do what we did in 1995 when it was the largest force?
Here are three 21st century Rules for Reporting:
Rule #1: Don’t report results during options-expirations. In Feb 2019 Goldman Sachs put out a note saying the top trading strategy during earnings season was buying five-day out of the money calls. That is, buy the rights (it was 1996 when OMC offered that same advice in a song called How Bizarre.). Sell them before earnings. This technique, Goldman said, produced an average 88% return in the two preceding quarters.
How? If calls can be bought for $1.20 and sold for $2.25, that’s an 88% return. But it’s got nothing to do with your results, or rational views of your price.
The closer to expirations, the cheaper and easier the arbitrage trade. Report AFTER expirations. Stop reporting in the middle of them. And don’t report at the ends of months. Passives are truing up tracking then. Here’s our IR Planning Calendar.
Rule #2: Be unpredictable, not predictable. Arbitrage schemes depend on three factors: price, volatility, and time. Time equals WHEN you report. If you always publish dates at the same time in advance, you pitch a fastball straight down the middle over the plate, letting speculative sluggers slam it right over the fence.
Stop doing that. Vary it. Better, be vague. You can let your holders and analysts know via email, then put out an advisory the day of earnings pointing to your website. Comply with the rules – but don’t serve speculators.
Rule #3: Know your market structure and measure it before and after results to shape message beforehand and internal feedback afterward. The bad news about mathematical markets is they’re full of arbitragers. The good news is math is a perfect grid for us to measure with machines. We can see everything the money is doing.
If we can, you can (use our analytics!). If you can know every day what sets your price, how it may move with results, whether there are massive synthetic short bets queued up and looming over your press release, well…why wouldn’t you want to know?
Let’s do 21st century IR. No need to burn tallow like cave dwellers. Go Modern. It’s time.
