January 8, 2020

What Matters

Happy New Year!

I hope you enjoyed our gift:  A two-week break from my bloviating!  We’d planned to run best-of columns and thought better, because everybody deserves a respite.

We relished the season in the Colorado mountains, as this album shows (see world-class ski-race video too).  If the album eludes you, this is Steamboat Springs 2020, and us on snowshoes, and the view up high where it’s always 3 o’clock (a superb ski run).

I’m thinking about 2020.  And I’m reading “The Man Who Solved the Market,” about quant hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, by Wall Street Journal reporter Greg Zuckerman.  You should read it, too.

About 47% in, my Kindle says, Zuckerman writes, “One day, a data-entry error caused the fund to purchase five times as many wheat-futures contracts as it intended, pushing prices higher.

“Picking up the next day’s Wall Street Journal, sheepish staffers read that analysts were attributing the price surge to fears of a poor wheat harvest.”

There’s so much going on behind stock-prices that’s something other than we think. The point for IR people and investors is why do we do what we do?

In fact, it’s a human question. We do things on the belief they count.

For instance, the quarterly “Q&A bible,” the compendium of earnings-call questions, dominated holiday discussion in NIRI eGroups.

Discourse is great.  But does all that preparatory effort matter?

If we’re spending the same time and effort in 2020 on earnings-call Q&A that we did in 2000, well, why?  In 2000, more than 70% of the money was rational. Today it’s 14%.

Tesla is up 42% the past year, which included an earnings call where CEO Elon Musk trashed an analyst during Q&A.  The Twittersphere blew up.

The stock didn’t.

You should have your executive team prepared for questions, investor-relations professionals. But you don’t need a bible in 2020 because rational behavior is a paltry part of why stocks move.

Equal to preparation for questions should be the time directed to educating your executives and board on what can move price with results, and why, and what historical data indicate are risks, and why risk exists in the first place – and if you can mitigate it by changing WHEN you report and how you notify investors.

And if you’re 10/10 Overbought and 60% short before you report, put your best VALUE foot forward. Data, not Q&A, should driver call-prep.

Human beings do things because they ostensibly matter and produce returns.  If we’re going through motions because it’s tradition, then 2020 should be the year you change tradition.

And investors. What matters to you?  Returns, right?

The average S&P 500 component moves 36% every month, intraday (1.6% each day between highest and lowest prices), change often lost in closing prices.  In a perfectly modulated, utterly quantitative Shangri-La, you’d capture ALL of that by buying low and selling high.  You could make 432% per year.

That’ll never happen. Eugene Fama, legendary University of Chicago economics professor, who’s 80 years old and still teaching, won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating the return-diminishing pugnacity of volatility.

But if there’s so much volatility, why expend immense effort finding great companies when the odds are roughly 1% that doing so will produce market-beating returns?

Wouldn’t it be smarter – wouldn’t it matter more – to surf volatility waves in today’s market?

I find in traveling around the country – we’re headed to Austin Thursday – talking to IR people and investors that they’re depressed by these things.

If what we learned doesn’t matter, should we rend garments, gnash teeth and weep?

No.

That’s like being depressed by passing time.  Time is a fact.  We can make the most of it, or we can rue its passage.  What’s it gonna be?

So what, IR people, if you don’t need a 400-page Q&A document that requires a software package to manage?  A single Word page, stored to the cloud so you can cross-reference in future quarters, is proportionate.  You’ve saved TIME to do things that MATTER.

What matters?  If you want to be in the US equity markets in 2020 as a public company, an investor-relations professional, an investor, what matters is knowing what money is doing.

It’s a law of success.  It’s not what you know about YOU that matters.  It’s what you know about life, the environment you’re in, the job you’re doing, about how to build relationships.

Right?

We should stop spending all our time understanding our businesses, and none understanding the market that assigns value to them.  That’s the flaw of IR.  Nothing more.  Let’s change it in 2020.

And you investors, why all the Sisyphean work finding great businesses without first understanding how the market transforms those businesses into products with fleeting and ever-evolving value?

If you could capture just 10% of the daily volatility of the S&P 500 by buying stuff low and selling it high, you’d win. It’s provable, useful math. That matters.

Resolve to make 2020 the year you learn what the money is doing.  It matters. We at ModernIR figured out the road map. Ask us how to start on the journey.

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