June 29, 2022

What We Do

We’re about to decamp for Switzerland for the month of July.  It’s an example of time and experience changing what we do. 

We’re blessed to have the freedom and means to do it.  But that’s not the point.

The Pandemic and observation – seeing our aging relatives, aging friends, no longer able to do what they’d want, right at the point they’ve got the time and money to do it – have prompted us to seize the day.

Illustration 121184273 © Noree Saisalam | Dreamstime.com

We won’t always be able to ride bikes from Montreux to Zurich.  But we can now.  So we’re doing it now.

Which gets to the question I hear most from investor-relations people.  They’re intellectually interested in “market structure,” the way the market works.

After all, we’re the professionals (a line critical to the great Denzel Washington movie, “Man on Fire”).  We’re supposed to know how the stock market works.

And so often I hear, “What do I do with it?”

If you were to learn through God or some miracle of science (oxymoron purposeful) that you had ten years to live, what would you do?  Keep on doing what you’ve always done?

Here’s what the data show irrefutably about the stock market.  And for backdrop, I think we’ve written more about market form and function than anybody in the USA, right here on this page.  About 800 words per week, nearly every week, since 2006.

I’ve testified to Congress (in writing) about how to improve the market for issuers and investors.  Been on CNBC talking about market structure.  Done it in our profession for two decades.

And I summed up the Essentials last week. Three things every public company should be doing.

If you’re a smallcap, go big or go home. You can’t stay small. If you’re a public company, you should understand the cadence and rhythm of the stock market – its context, let’s call it – and don’t put out earnings, important news, during its violent thunderstorms (options-expirations, rebalances).

And your principal job now is using data to help your executive team and Board of Directors make good decisions about deploying shareholder capital. 

It’s not telling the story to a diminishing audience.

Look, I don’t mean people aren’t showing up at Non-deal Road Shows, sellside conferences. I mean stock-pickers are an endangered species that doesn’t set prices.

I don’t know a profession less data-driven than ours. We do a bunch of things out of tradition, not data demonstrate returns.

Many a time I’ve sat in meetings with IR people who argued that “we’ve got a pretty good sense of what’s going on.”  And they don’t even know what Reg NMS is. 

Would you run a business that way – got a pretty good sense of what’s going on? How the can a professional pursuit like IR, which has a certification program?

You could be the Zoom Video Communications (ZM) investor-relations team talking to investors in 2020 – by web meeting – and think you’re just killing it. And that was before anyone had heard of ZM.

And you could be the ZM IR team now, a ubiquitous brand name and a massively larger business, talking to investors and the 30-odd sellside analysts covering the stock, and it trades below where it did in Mar 2020.

Because telling the story to this crowd doesn’t create shareholder value.

Asset allocation – the earmarking of money to parts and groups and slices of the market according to a model – and speculation, furious trading, and leverage with derivatives, create and dispel shareholder value.

You can measure your Engagement with stock-pickers quantitatively (we do it) but they don’t set prices more than about 10% of the time.

At this moment, it’s a great time for ZM to call on holders. Because the Supply/Demand balance – every public company should know that balance (and you can, just ask) – is favorable.

What you do with it is you ground your company in reality and make the most of an equity market that’s not driven anymore by stock-pickers.

How much money do you spend on targeting, tracking interaction with the buyside and sellside, keeping up with what your peers are doing? About $50,000 annually?

And how do you tie that to shareholder value with data? 

You can’t. It doesn’t.  You CAN use data to help your company make the most of the market.  Just not that data. 

What we come to understand about life should affect how we participate in it.  And it’s all about what we do with the time we’re given.

The same applies to the IR profession, or any endeavor for that matter. Knowledge should change what we do and how we do it.

Investor-relations is the data-driven mission to maximize listing in public equity markets, which starts with understanding the stock market.

And with that, we’re off to Switzerland.

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