At county fairs when I was a kid you could buy a “Shoshoni Weather Gauge,” which hawkers said could forecast the weather like an American Indian.

It was a rock tied with a leather strand to a wooden stand. The instructions said: “If rock is wet, it’s raining. If rock is dry and hot, it’s sunny. If rock is cold and covered with fluffy white layer, it’s snowing.”

Similarly, I saw this in a recent Bloomberg article: “The best way to keep pace with the S&P last year would have been a strategy that rotated between sectors based on the macro headlines,” said David Spika, fund manager at Westwood Holdings in Dallas.

That sounds a lot like “if rock is wet, it’s raining.” The elegance of simplicity notwithstanding, how do you distinguish the IR chair and your company’s shares in a market moving on whether the rock is wet or not?

One argument says you change your focus. Deemphasize the capital markets and instead get baptized in Dodd-Frank, proxy evolution, say-on-pay and myriad others rules and regulations oozing like molasses through public capital markets. Become a compliance concierge. Well and good. But you’ll be competing with internal and external legal counsel for thought leadership, and I find that the advantage lawyers have is they have law degrees. Continue reading →

Happy New Year! If the holidays this year seemed sweeter, the air more welcome to the well-caroled note, it’s probably because I’ve been quiet for two straight weeks.

And with good reason. The lovely KQ and I winged southward with fellow wayfarers for time over the keel on the cayes and reefs of Belize. At Queens Cayes east off Placencia past the wildlife preserve at Laughing Bird Caye, we found what one friend called “your own Corona commercial.” As the sun faded toward dusk there, we caught this grand view of our boats on Dec 11. Our companions below the surface included this delightful fellow, a spotted eagle ray. The Eagle Ray Club is a good name for a rock band. Continue reading →

Belated Happy Thanksgiving!

After breaking for a week as an act of giving thanks, we’re back. Karen and I joined 88,622 others in Aggieland at Kyle Field in College Station for the A&M football game last Thursday versus the Texas Longhorns. Disappointing outcome, great Thanksgiving.

There’s something special about Texas. People passing you on the street say hi and the kids say yes ma’am and yes sir. There’s a lot of what Kenny Chesney calls “the good stuff.” What may be the world’s greatest college bar, the Dixie Chicken, sits on the main College Station drag like an Old West saloon. Batwing doors, even.

Speaking of swinging doors, gyrations in markets make it awfully hard to use your stock price to measure investor sentiment (wasn’t that the idea behind exchanges?). In fact, there’s inherent contradiction between the way markets behave now and how the IR profession cultivates holders.

IR folks typically seek buy-and-hold money that does not trade. Yet executives frequently ask about the stock price. The news rushing at us round the clock tries to explain market behavior in rational terms. Yet stock prices are set by the latest fleeting bid or offer. Nine of ten times, those prices are not rational. Continue reading →

There’s a saying: It’s easier to keep the cat in the bag than to get it back in there once you’ve let it out. Nobody is likely to stuff the Exchange Traded Fund (ETF) cat back in the bag.

Because ETFs are miraculous.

The biblical story of creation is that something came from nothing. Same with the Christian concept of redemption – being bought for a price without rendering equal worth in kind.

Today, we’ll share with occupants of the IR chair the divine story of how ETFs work.

Before ETFs were closed-end mutual funds. Closed end funds (CEFs) are publicly traded securities that IPO to raise capital and pursue a business objective (like any business), in this case an investment thesis. Traded units have a price, and the net asset value rises and falls on the success of managers in achieving objectives. The rub with CEFs is that share value can depart from net asset value – just like stocks often separate from intrinsic business worth.

The investment industry, with support from regulators, devised ETFs to magically remedy through Creation and Redemption this fault of nature. ETF kingpin iShares, owned by Blackrock, illustrates here, with a clever floral analogy (thank you Joe Saluzzi at Themis Trading who alerted us to it). You don’t have to buy individual flowers and face market risks because iShares puts them in a bouquet for you. Great idea. Continue reading →

Having never gone to a Neighborhood Pumpkin-Carving, we were wistful when squirrels promptly devoured the face off our finished product (marked “easiest” in the booklet of pumpkin-carving patterns we purchased). Ah well. What some consider a jack-o-lantern others see as a meal.

Speaking of scary, for those keeping record we note more currency-driven events to explain to your executives. First, the European Central Bank last week threw down the red carpet for Greek lenders, so the dollar dived and stocks soared on changes to perceived risk and anticipated further global currency-printing. On Halloween, Japan intervened to weaken the yen by buying other currencies, so the dollar strengthened (less supply, same demand) and markets plunged. On Nov 1, fear of setbacks on the Greece deal drove risk managers back to the dollar, pushing it up and stocks down more.

US markets should be proxies for fundamental value and forward multiples of collective corporate cash flows. Not meters for currency fluctuations. Happy Halloween.

Speaking of meters, there is Tom Peterffy, immigrant, billionaire, and architect of automated trading. Peterffy ranked 236th on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest in 2009, fruits of long labor revolutionizing how stocks trade. Peterffy, founder of Timber Hill and Interactive Brokers, pioneers in automated multi-asset-class electronic trading, believes automated trading goes too far. Continue reading →