Early in my career I worked on Wall Street and woke, absurdly early, to publish a daily strategy piece for customers of my trading desk. I took stock of overnight developments and morning headlines, and had thoughtful commentary written, approved, and distributed before 8am. If I’m honest, every now and then I would entertain clients the night before, and the research wasn’t exactly as “thoughtful” as it might have been. On balance, however, it was widely read and well-received by investors.  

One public-company focus of our general client work building strong multiples centers on what we call the “earnings materials and channel mix.” There’s what a company reports at earnings time; and then there’s how it packages and distributes that information. For decades, the press release format has served as the default standard for the latter activity. In 2024, it’s not at all clear why. Beyond the pressure of habit and entrenched wire-distribution platforms, the benefits of the traditional earnings press release for the average company have never been more limited.

In a recent post we wrote about the utility of economic fame and the importance of business model discoverability for private and public companies. This post zeroes in on a keystone principle of our approach to competitive economics:  properly marketing a tightly-defined market, vs. just serving business audiences a TAM (total addressable market) figure with a side of CAGR.

Readers who prefer bite-sized and more eccentric commentary on the capital markets and business models can doom-scroll through this post, to which I add periodically. Opinions are my own - with apologies to Nietzsche and Marcus Aurelius, among others - and best enjoyed as slightly dangerous play.

A few weeks ago, a colleague flagged for me a pleasantly surprising article in Axios about companies modernizing the way they distribute earnings information. Eleanor Hawkins’ reporting describes an emerging trend towards what Sinter would call more digital and social IR. I write “pleasantly surprising” because, for the most part, the average public company still does very little with its IR web presence, and looks at digital and social channels mostly as afterthoughts. This mindset is something that small- to mid-cap companies in particular should change.

We spend a lot of time working with clients to make their business models well-enough understood that - no matter a given quarter’s results - investors still believe in future performance. You could call this “investor relations.” Or you could call it what it really is: building a more resilient multiple by becoming famous for how you make money.

Part 1 of this post outlined how to dive much deeper into whether or not a company’s typical, traditional IR syncs up with the ways that investors and trading software actually interact with its shareholder web presence. In many cases, they don’t, for the reasons we explained here. In this post, we talk about how to activate analysis and digital analytics to make the typical IR function far more impactful.

In our prior post, we described the low expectations most companies have for their IR sites, and the low web-presence utility that flows from that. We itemized what IR sites could do better for public companies. This post explains more about how easy it is to act on this advice and why it makes sense. Specifically, we describe how to activate most companies’ biggest unused valuation lever:  intra–quarter digital and social investor marketing.

For some years now, the team at Sinter as well as our network partners have spent a lot of time thinking about AI and its underlying basis, algorithms. Well before ChatGPT and other “consumer” AI platforms became a thing, we and companies like Literate AI were wrestling with how to make algorithms, and the market behavior they drive, more understandable and manageable for the average business. 

More than ever, life is digital, whether we are shopping, dating, exercising or investing. And for better or worse, a normal part of online life is being recognized by websites and devices. This makes information easier to find, and more relevant to choices like buying and selling. Recognition (really, tracking, measurement and algorithms) builds relationships (or behavior loops) between online audiences and businesses. Unless you visit an IR website.

In our prior blog post, we described the drawbacks of confusing business performance with business models. We also outlined the limitations of traditional investor relations, vs. what we call value marketing.

United States stock exchanges list ~4,200 public companies. Most of those businesses have so-called mid-cap or lower valuations. Many - well over a thousand, even the large-cap stocks - regularly trade below their cash and/or book value.