You may want to examine or delve into the phrase, which has become pervasive in conference calls and grates on many; ‘It’s almost like a joke’
4 min
Ruben Roy isn’t a guy who tends to beat himself up, but he’s still chagrined about what he said on an earnings call last month.
A managing director at Stifel Financial , Roy dialled in to hear the chief executive of a healthcare company discuss its latest results. During the Q&A, Roy asked the speaker to elaborate on his remarks about investment opportunities.
“I wanted to double-click a bit on some of the commentary you had,” Roy said, instantly cringing.
One of the fastest-spreading corporate buzzwords in recent years, “double-click” is both polarising and pervasive. Particularly on Wall Street, the figure of speech is now being used as a shorthand for examining something more fully, akin to double-clicking to see a computer folder’s contents. Some, like Roy, find the idiom obnoxious or twee. Double-click defenders say the phrase encourages deeper thinking.
Either way, it’s become a verbal tic du jour. Executives and analysts dropped double-click 644 times in corporate conference calls and events during the first half of the year, according to VIQ Solutions, up from 139 times in the same period of 2020.
“It’s almost like a joke. People are like, oh here we go with double-click,” says Roy, who’d been trying to avoid using the term when he accidentally let it slip. Colleagues, he says, haven’t let him forget it.
Annie Mosbacher, a Los Angeles-based marketer, recalls snapping to attention last year when she heard an executive use the phrase during a strategy meeting. Afterward, she and colleagues discussed it: “It was like, oh my gosh, double-click? I guess this is a thing now?”
The new jargon makes her roll her eyes. “Can’t we just say ‘this is an area we need to focus on?’” she says. “We regurgitate this sort of lingo as though it means something, and usually it’s about trying to be impressive more than anything else.”
Not so, says Ruben Linder, who’s owned a small audio and video production business in San Antonio for 25 years. These days, with the rise of technology and a more hectic corporate life, Linder says people need reminders to stop and examine what matters—to double-click, if you will.
“The term is simple, but it’s really profound,” he says. He tries to carve out time to go to a cafe twice monthly with a notebook and engage in reflection.
“I’ll double-click on my business, double-click on my life,” he says. “I double-click on everything now.”
Double-click lingo has leapfrogged beyond corporate America. While CEOs including Walmart’s Douglas McMillon and Nvidia ’s Jensen Huang have deployed the term, so, too, have congressional representatives, influencers and authors such as parenting guru Dr. Becky Kennedy.
The phrase is “innovative,” says Beth DelGiacco, a vice president of corporate communications at biotech company Argenx , who praises its efficiency.
“It’s only a few syllables. Everyone knows what you mean when you say it,” says DelGiacco, who regularly trots it out with peers.
Tech-inflected buzzwords are especially apt to gain traction—think “network,” “bandwidth” or “take offline”—because they can sound smart or cutting-edge, says Doug Guilbeault, an assistant professor at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business who has studied corporate jargon.
The inventor of the literal double-click, former Apple designer Bill Atkinson, isn’t convinced. Reached while boating on a recent weekday, Atkinson, now retired, says he’s never heard anyone use double-click as a metaphor and would steer clear of such usage himself, preferring more straightforward language.
He adds that since inventing the function in 1979, he’s come to regret it. He now thinks an extra “Shift” button on the mouse would have been more user-friendly.
“The double-click was a mistake,” says Atkinson, who left tech in 1995 to pursue nature photography. Personally, he double-clicks less frequently these days, given the rise of mouseless devices like tablets and smartphones.
“I double-tap, or I tap,” he says. “I long-press.”
Buzzwords tend to come and go, says HR consultant Nancy Settle-Murphy, noting that other tech-inspired jargon, such as “RTFM”—or read the f—ing manual—are less commonly used today than they once were.
“There are fewer manuals now,” says Settle-Murphy, who recently installed a video doorbell at her home and notes it didn’t come with any pictures or diagrams.
Corporate jargon can be alienating. At a conference, Settle-Murphy was thrown when an audience member asked the speaker to double-click on a point they’d made.
“I thought, ‘these are slides, there’s no link, how can they double-click?’” she says, admitting she later searched online to find the new meaning.
Double-click has a long pedigree in the sales world. Matt Sunshine, head of the Center for Sales Strategy, which trains salespeople, says when he sold ad spots for a local radio station in Dallas in the 1990s, peers commonly used the term.
“Sales leaders would say, ‘Hey, you need to make sure you double-click on that’ with your prospects,” Sunshine says, meaning delve more deeply into any issues customers might raise, as in “Tell me more.”
While he doesn’t know exactly when it first took off, he says the phrase neatly encapsulates a core principle in effective sales strategy, in which salespeople seek to identify and address customers’ needs and concerns, instead of defaulting to one-size-fits-all pitches.
Double-clicking can help identify new business prospects, says Scott Bond, vice president of consumer services at Canadian real-estate company Rennie, which recently opened a U.S. location in Seattle.
Not long ago, Bond was on a Zoom call with his boss and some new business contacts based in southern California. The group hit it off, and afterward, Bond found himself mulling possibilities.
“I looked at my boss and said, hold on, I think we’re being presented with an opportunity here,” he says. “Why don’t we dive in and learn a little more?” His boss agreed, and the company is now planning to open its second American location in the Palm Springs area.
“We double-clicked,” he says.
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Wall Street’s hottest momentum trade has reversed sharply, as former winners tumble and heavily shorted stocks surge.
3 min
Wall Street’s hottest trade has gone ice cold.
For years, it paid off to buy stocks that were rising in price—and bet against struggling shares. The momentum trade was especially profitable this year, as investors piled into hot stocks including Micron Technology, Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and other artificial-intelligence darlings while wagering against those likely to be hurt by the embrace of AI.
The S&P 500 Momentum Index soared 44% in the second quarter, its best quarterly performance on record, and it surged 133% over the past five years, nearly double the broad market’s performance.
Mega funds and rookie investors alike piled into the trade, some using leverage and options contracts in an effort to amplify their returns, propelling the underlying shares higher.
“It is a self-fulfilling prophecy,” said Matthew Tym, managing director at Cantor Fitzgerald, of the trade.
Suddenly, the trade is a loser. The momentum index has tumbled more than 9% since July 1, lagging behind the S&P 500’s 2.8% gain. The index—which tracks stocks in the S&P 500 based on a “momentum score”—is on track for the biggest quarterly underperformance in 25 years. July was the second-worst month for the momentum trade in around 40 years, according to Bank of America estimates; the only month worse was April 2009, in the teeth of the global financial crisis.
Hedge funds that bought momentum shares while shorting low-momentum stocks suffered even more. At the same time, a basket of the most popular stocks held by hedge funds tracked by Goldman Sachs recorded its biggest one-month underperformance in July relative to the S&P 500 in more than 20 years, according to the bank’s analysts.
Momentum trading is based on a rather simple observation: Investments that go up tend to keep outperforming; those that underperform often remain laggards. This kind of trading might seem too simple a stock-picking strategy to work. Yet it often has.
“For decades, it didn’t take a lot of sophistication to run a momentum strategy and make a decent living at it,” says Agustin Lebron, senior researcher at EquiLibre, a trading firm.
Part of the reason: It takes a while for corporate and other information to spread to various investors, so they slowly build positions, producing buying momentum.
“A huge pension fund can’t flip around its positions in a day,” says Lebron. “Behavioral biases also account for some of the effect, as well—people tend to sell their winners too early and hold losers too long.”
Fans of the strategy point to the human tendency to extrapolate from past results—and chase investment returns—noting that momentum patterns have been evident in markets for decades, even centuries. They also say that some of the worst months for momentum strategies are during longer periods of outperformance.
Some have been doing the trade by buying the strongest investments in a sector while shorting the weakest; others lean in to rising markets or asset classes. Still others use a quantitative approach or turn to banks or others who sell ways to make distinct wagers on momentum as a “tradable factor” or a “thematic basket.”
The fans remain believers. “Any strategy has disappointing periods,” says Antti Ilmanen, global co-head of the portfolio solutions group at AQR Capital Management.
The surge in Moderna and other biotech stocks helped crush the momentum trade. These shares were among the most heavily shorted in recent years, but positive news on a cancer vaccine from Moderna and Merck sent those stocks flying, crushing some quant and other hedge funds. Moderna is up around 150% so far this month.
These traders had an especially rough day on Aug. 19, which Goldman Sachs told its clients was the worst day for “systematic long-short managers” in more than two years. About half of the losses were because of momentum trades, the bank said.
Some traders have begun to short, or bet against, the very stocks that propelled the momentum trade earlier this year. Net short positions in futures tied to the Nasdaq-100 index among speculators recently climbed to some of the highest levels of the past two decades, according to data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.
The about-face is a sign of how markets have become more treacherous for investors, even as indexes keep climbing. Part of the issue: the recent meltdown of Situational Awareness, a hedge fund that had piled into some of the most popular momentum shares, including chip stocks. After a period of market tumult, Nvidia shares rocketed almost 9% after its earnings, showing how quickly sentiment can shift.
Some investors say the run-up in share prices driving tech stocks higher reminds them at times of the dot-com frenzy decades ago.
Mike Ogborne, the founder of San Francisco-based Ogborne Capital Management, said he has grown more cautious on technology stocks and is keeping more of his portfolio in cash than he typically does.
And he is nervous about the surge in spending by technology giants and quarterly capital expenditures that keep rising.
“It is a little bit like Cinderella and the clock striking midnight. You don’t know when midnight is going to come around,” Ogborne said. “They don’t send a memo around telling you when the capex cycle is over.”
