Keep your eye on your engagements
With a more frugal budget than counterparts at some larger firms, Thomas Kudsk Larsen of Sobi takes the view that his IR spend simply doesn’t stretch to a stock surveillance service.
When an activist entered Sobi’s stock, the fund got in touch immediately, Larsen points out. ‘It wanted to have meetings,’ he says.
Those meetings were held and engagement was steady. ‘Then in the middle of last year, I stopped hearing from it,’ Larsen says. ‘It stopped checking in. It didn’t have any more questions – I assume it sold out.’
With a good web agency you can see who is looking at your website
By tracking engagements and looking at who reaches out and who asks questions, Larsen says he knows exactly who owns the stock. Talking to IR Magazine in March 2023, he says the stock had opened down that morning. ‘Within five minutes, the first hedge fund in London called so of course I then knew it owns the stock,’ he says.
In addition to monitoring interactions or using a stock watch firm, both Larsen and Steve Austenfeld of The Honest Company say IROs should pay attention to who joins webcasts or logs into the company earnings call – or even who is downloading reports from the IR site.
‘Your website can be monitored very easily,’ says Larsen. ‘With a good web agency you can see who is looking at your website. That’s free information.’
‘When we show up, we think of ourselves as value-added shareholders,’ says Gianluca Ferrari of Clearway Capital. ‘Some companies have even reached out to us in the past asking if we would be willing to take a stake. I think that’s proof of the solid relationships we try to build with the businesses we invest in.’
