This is a bit off-topic, but I’ve been paying more attention to the quality of companies’ investor relations materials lately. While fundamentals always come first, I’ve noticed that some of my best-performing investments also have top-notch IR materials.
For example, $ELF’s investor deck really stands out. It’s the most impressive deck I have come across to date, at almost 100 pages long and packed with data-driven KPIs that clearly show where the business is headed.
I recently took a closer look at $NU and was happy to find they offer a downloadable Excel file with all the KPIs from their investor deck, going back several years. This made it much easier for me to analyze the company and decide to invest.
On the other hand, as Muji pointed out about $CRWD’s Q1 earnings report, they pulled the NRR metric and wouldn’t provide a number during the earnings call. While this doesn’t completely change my investment thesis, it did raise a red flag.
I know it’s a bit controversial, but I think $TSLA’s investor deck is pretty poor. It doesn’t cover the key KPIs I want to see. $S doesn’t even have an investor deck—they just send out an investor letter, which is pretty underwhelming. $AXON, on the other hand, does quarterly earnings videos. I don’t usually watch them, but I appreciate their creativity and understanding of the value of high-quality IR materials.
In summary, I’m not saying there’s a direct correlation between returns and the quality of IR materials, but when I think about my scorecard or checklist, the quality of IR could be a deciding factor for me.
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Interestingly, for me at least, ELF’s quarterly earnings call (the IR role in particular) was one of the things that led me to sell my shares.
The beginning of the call was this long glossy pre-prepared slide presentation, which they certainly spent lots of time and resources putting together. Don’t get me wrong, it looked great. But I remember thinking “why is all of their attention on this and why are they making us watch this before starting the call?”
It was essentially like a typical presentation deck that a company would put together for an investor/analyst conference. And that’s not a bad thing on it’s own. But I remember sitting through it waiting for it to end so that we could get to some real questions and new information. They could have just posted the presentation earlier, at the same time as the press release came out, rather than making the listeners sit through it all.
The ELF call started 30 minutes before the SNOW call started that day, and when the SNOW call started, the ELF call was still (thirty minutes in) running through this long slow pre-prepared slide presentation.
On the other hand, one of the things I love about TSLA’s earnings calls is they don’t spend any time reading over the same information that was already in the earnings release. Most companies have a script that the CEO and CFO read through with 90% of the information almost verbatim from the press release that was already sent out. I think most companies do this simply because other companies do it the same way. With Tesla, the CEO makes a couple comments that only last a couple minutes (maybe two or three minutes if I recall correctly?) and then they are already taking analyst and investor questions less than five minutes after the call starts.
That’s just my own impression. I’m not saying my preference is necessarily the “right” one, as I’m sure other investors have different things that they like to see and that makes them feel best informed and able to evaluate the companies followed.
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