I debated high-frequency trader Remco Lenterman on market structure for two hours.
Legendary financial writer Kate Welling (longtime Barron’s managing editor) moderated. Your executives should be reading Kate so propose to your CFO or CEO that you get a subscription to wellingonwallstreet.com. The blow-by-blow with Remco is called Mano-a-Mano but the reason to read is Kate’s timely financial reporting.
Speaking of market structure, yesterday the SEC’s Equity Market Structure Advisory Committee (EMSAC…makes one think of a giant room-sized flashing and whirring machine) met on matters like high-frequency trading and exchange-traded funds.
Public companies have a friend or two there (IEX’s Brad Katsuyama, folks from Invesco and T Rowe Price) but no emissaries. Suppose we were starting a country to be of, for, and by the people but the cadre creating it weren’t letting the people vote?
It makes one think the party convening the committee (the SEC) can’t handle the truth. After all, it was the person heading that body, Mary Jo White, who proclaimed in May that the equity market exists for investors and issuers and their interests must be paramount. It’s a funny way to show it.
And now the NYSE and the Nasdaq, left off too, are protesting. BATS is on while listing only ETFs. The Nasdaq generates most of its revenue from data and technology services, not listings. Intercontinental Exchange, parent of the NYSE, yesterday bought Interactive Data Corp, a giant data vendor, for $5.6 billion.
How long have we been saying the exchanges are in the data and technology businesses? They’re shareholder-owned entities that understand market structure and how to make money under its rules. That’s not bad but it means they’re not your advocates (yet you get the majority of your IR tools through them, which should give you pause).
On CNBC yesterday morning the Squawk Box crew was talking about one of our clients whose revenues near $2 billion were a million dollars – to the third decimal point in effect – shy of estimates. Droves of sellsiders have shifted to the IR chair, suggesting diminishing impact from equity research and yet that stock moved 8% intraday between high and low prices.
What long-term investor cares if a company’s revenues are $2.983 billion or $2.984 billion (numbers massaged for anonymity)? So how can it be rational?
I hear it now: “It’s not the number but the trend.” “It’s the color.” “Revenues weren’t the issue but the guidance was.”
You’re making the point for me. IR professionals have vast and detailed knowledge of our fundamentals as public companies, as we should. We know each nuance in the numbers, as we should. We understand the particulate minutia of variances in flux analysis. As we should.
But we don’t get the mechanics of how shares are bought and sold, or by whom. We don’t know how many can be consumed without moving price. We trust somehow the stock market works and it’s somebody else’s responsibility to ensure that it does.
Ask yourselves: Would we trust our sales and revenues to a black box? Then why do we trust our balance sheets – underpinned by equity – to one?
Read my debate with Remco Lenterman about what constitutes liquidity and what sets price today (throw in with the c-suite on a subscription to wellingonwallstreet.com).
We picked two of scores of reporting clients this week and checked tick data at the open. Prices for both were set by one traded share. Suppose you’re the CEO with a stake worth $300 million. We’ve got one of those reporting tomorrow. What if the first trade is for one share, valued at say $80, and it shaves 8% off market-cap? That’s $24 million lost in that moment, on paper, for your CEO on a trade for $80.
Now you can say, “You’re caught up in the microsecond, Quast. You need to think long-term.”
Or you could wonder, “Why is that possible? And is it good for long-term money?”
It’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for rational investors to price a stock at the open in today’s market structure. But we have the power to change that condition by demanding to be part of the conversation. It starts with caring about market structure – because you don’t want the CEO coming back to you later asking, “Why didn’t you tell me?”
Somebody from among us must be on that SEC committee, whirring lights and all.
