A baseball player who gets a hit once every three at bats is almost guaranteed to be elected to the hall of fame. However, baseball's measure of excellence does not apply to investor relations where IROs and CFOs polled for the October issue of CFO magazine gave their surveillance firms a 29% batting average.

In order to assess shareholder identification efforts, CFO magazine, in conjunction with NIRI, surveyed a large number of investor relations professionals. Results revealed that fully 50% of respondents use stock surveillance but only 29% are very confident of findings. Paul Schulman of proxy consultancy Altman Group summed up: "CFOs may think they have an idea of who owns their stock, but when it comes to real-time knowledge, they really don't." It is incredible that IR departments feel compelled to spend thousands of dollars a month on information they believe to be right less than a third of the time.

One of the biggest drawbacks with the surveillance data is the great gap between timeframes for regulatory filings like 13Fs and 13Ds versus the peripatetic way of the equity markets now. This results in investors and IROs relying on outdated information.

IROs need to consider updating their thinking rather than frustrating their IR strategies and budgets with anachronistic measures and tools of limited reliability. If investors are engaged in efforts to conceal themselves…could it be that they don’t wish to be known? Perhaps they’re running multi-asset products that don’t turn anymore on relationships or fundamentals alone. And if so, what fruit should an IRO expect from efforts to establish a relationship?

We’ve used this comparison before, but what if geopolitical counterintelligence relied on hearsay and ignored satellite reconnaissance? Satellite images are indispensable now to everything from geological surveys to spooks. It’s modern technology.

Be sure to read the CFO magazine article. And if you’re not using the equivalent of IR satellite imagery to understand the forces at work behind your volume, you’re trying to operate pre-Sputnik in a decidedly post-Sputnik era (apologies for any mixed metaphors).