CI's shareholder mix amplified its stock swings

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 39:29

   But the story of how you built this is so wild. I want to go back to when you took over the company and then we're going to launch into Coriant, the acquisition you did, the fact that the stock market hated what you were doing and you were just resolute in the face of this drastically falling stock price. So if we go back, It's like, okay, I laid out this plan to this like sleepy Canadian company.

2. 39:50

   I'm going, this is what I want to do. Then can you bring us from that point until, and basically how you've been building Coriant? Yeah. So there's a couple of things. So one, you know, kind of the first. thing is you have to have conviction in the business and the idea, as we've talked about a lot, a tremendous amount of conviction in both the opportunity for the business and in tune, ultimately, what we could do for clients.

3. 40:10

   The second piece, as you mentioned, is volatility. So you have to kind of put that a little bit in context as well, is can you, you know, public companies don't typically love transformation stories. Well, hold on. We got to define volatility. Sure. How volatile was your stock when you're doing this? So like in 2021, we were, I think, the best or second best performing financial services stock in North America, 2022, the second worst, right?

4. 40:36

   And so you see a lot of tremendous volatility. So then you can start to unpack. I mean, so there's a couple of layers to that, right? So one layer is public markets don't necessarily love transformation stories. Now, to be fair to the public markets, we were taking effectively a Canadian asset management business and using the cash flow to build and launch a new ultra high net worth global wealth management business.

5. 41:02

   So pretty meaningful. That's a hard right turn. It is a pretty meaningful departure. Now, if you think about the underlying benefits, you're effectively creating diversification. You're diversifying from asset management to wealth management, from more mass affluent to ultra high net worth, from a single country to multiple different geographies. So the merits of doing it make sense, but kind of call it the journey from the starting position around the conviction of the idea and how public markets, you know, ultimately respond takes, take, you know, different turns and different courses. The second thing is when you're looking at public markets, a lot of it ties into the underlying composition of your shareholder base, right? And I'll tell you what I mean by that. So we had a series of strategic

6. 41:45

   investors, let's just say somewhere, you know, 15, 16, 17% of the entire float. We had a very small index inclusion, just given the company that we had, the market that we traded in. So, let's just say 25% of our float was locked up by strategic investors that didn't have intentions of selling and then indexes that effectively had to hold the stock. And that creates 75% of your float that's active. That is an unusually high active share. So, you say, well, who comprises the active share. It's hedge funds and it's mutual funds. So hedge funds, obviously, are looking to optimize performance. So a lot of the volatility comes, the reason 2021 was such a good year.

7. 42:30

   From a share price appreciation standpoint, it's obviously had a lot of hedge funds piling in. 2022, a lot of the hedge funds ultimately leaving, and that creates a tremendous amount of volatility in the stock. And then on the mutual fund side, so the mutual fund holders of the public company tended to be value-oriented mutual funds that have been in net redemptions from a, call it a category, for a number of years.

8. 42:53

   So think of it as every single morning, people wake up having to sell your shares to fund redemptions in their underlying mutual fund. Because there's headwinds in that industry. Inside of the underlying mutual fund. So again, there's a lot of different factors you can attribute to it. But the reality is you have a series of things happening at once. Building a brand new business, creating a massive transformation story inside of a public company, and then calling it having a composition of your shareholder base that doesn't, it's not like you have 85% of your shares locked up in a small float that dampens volatility.

9. 43:23

   You kind of have the opposite. But look, you have to stay true to the convictions that you ultimately have. And the part that gave me a lot of confidence was I had a tremendous conviction in the opportunity. I was able to see the business and the strategy taking off relatively quickly. So, you know, once you start to launch the strategy. What do you mean you were able to see it taking off relatively quickly?

10. 43:45

    I mean, just kind of to walk back from it. So, I launched Coriant in approximately April of 2020. You know, fast forward six years, north of $500 billion of assets. We have 3,000 employees. were operating in 15 different jurisdictions. And so the underlying strategy resonated really well early on. It was not tracking with the share price appreciation. So if you kind of think about it, you're seeing all of this progress in the underlying business, right? The partnership structure that we put in place starts to resonate. People want to join. You're starting to build momentum. So you're seeing the business itself start to form in a way that you had hoped that it would, but the share price ultimately isn't tracking.

11. 44:27

    And then at that point, you just have- And so you're just focusing on the internal metrics. Because you just see the business evolving. So this is what happened with Bezos, because I forgot the number. It was like his stock in the early days of Amazon went something from like $180 to like $6 or something like that. And he talks about in his shareholder letters, he's like, yeah, the stock is dropping, but all the internal metrics of the business are fine.

12. 44:46

    And then he would quote like Ben Graham. You know, he's like, I'm just focused on this. Eventually, the stock will be where it needs to be, but I can't worry about this short-term drop. Yeah, and you get confidence again in just seeing the business evolve. Like, and obviously, as- As your business continues to evolve, your expectations on success ultimately change, and you'll constantly continue to push yourself.