These are the last days of July. The year is more than half over. Many of us are still dealing with flood and storm-related damage. There’s a lot happening, but just not on the schedule.
> PH: There are no “hard” news events scheduled for this week, but there are a ton of analysts’ briefings scheduled for a long list of widely-held and influential PSE companies, like BDO [BDO 146.00, up 2.0%; 56% avgVol], Meralco [MER 388.00, up 1.0%; 133% avgVol], Robinsons Retail [RRHI 36.20, up 0.3%; 13% avgVol], Wilcon [WLCON 17.66, up 0.6%; 60% avgVol], Semirara [SCC 33.50, up 1.2%; 38% avgVol], UnionBank [UBP 36.10, up 0.3%; 26% avgVol], Metrobank [MBT 69.55, up 0.9%; 75% avgVol], Aboitiz Power [AP 33.95, up 0.7%; 22% avgVol], and Aboitiz Equity Ventures [AEV 35.60, down 1.9%; 53% avgVol]. An analyst briefing is a private meeting held between the company, attended by financial analysts, institutional investors, and other important “stakeholders”. Generally speaking, the only people not invited to these meetings are retail investors. I understand the need for companies to interface with sophisticated sources of capital, but I will always consider it part of the company’s responsibility to either stream these events live or provide links to recordings/transcripts on the same day the briefing is conducted. This is not common practice here for PSE companies. Some provide copies of the slide decks presented to the big-money players, and some will provide a transcript of the Q&A session, but few provide both the presentation materials and the transcript of what was said. I implore all companies conducting these briefings to provide those links to retail investors. It’s a simple action that can provide huge transparency gains.
>International: The US Federal Reserve will meet on Wednesday (US time) to decide on what to do with the central bank’s key interest rate. What they do will filter down to us in the early hours of Thursday morning. The market appears to expect the Fed to do nothing in this round but will be watching the statements made about its decision this week to see if the Fed’s pivot will be coming as early as next month.
MB bottom-line: I don’t think of myself as a financial analyst, but as a long-term investor, what a company says to institutional investors and sophisticated observers is something that is of great value to me. I don’t think that I’m alone in recognizing the value in that, and I don’t think that I’m the only one who can see the vast difference in quality between what is said publicly to all investors and what is said privately during these meetings. As someone who has worked in investor relations before, I know that all of the data from these meetings is collected and stored by the company for internal use, so it really is a trivial matter for someone in IR to publish the slides and transcripts to give retail investors access to the same level of information that everyone else gets to trade on before the market opens the next day. Kudos to any companies that do this! I will commend any that provide links in an easily accessible format.
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