Every few months, companies send out internal surveys asking employees what’s working and what isn’t.

Questions about:

Leadership reviews the results, creates new initiatives, implements changes, and then watches the survey scores over time to see if things are “improving.”

At first glance, this seems perfectly reasonable.

Measure the organization.
Improve the organization.
Track progress.

Simple.

But there’s a subtle statistical problem hiding underneath all of it.

And once I saw it, I couldn’t stop thinking about how it might apply to stock prices.

Imagine a company runs an employee survey this year and gets an average score of 7.1/10.

Next year, after implementing several new policies, the score rises to 7.8.

Leadership celebrates.

The initiatives worked.

…or did they?

Because there’s a catch:

People’s general opinions about organizations tend to remain surprisingly stable over time, relative to when they started. It’s an outcome of the Anchoring Effect.

Some employees are naturally:

In other words:
the differences between people are often much larger than the changes within a person over time.

And that creates a huge measurement issue.

Because the organization may think it’s measuring:

When in reality, it may mostly be measuring:

The score changed because:

Not necessarily because the company itself fundamentally improved.

That idea fascinated me.

But then my brain immediately jumped somewhere else.

The stock market.

Most people think stock prices move because:

And sometimes that’s true.

But not always.

Because a stock price is not just a reflection of the business itself.

It’s also a reflection of:

And just like employee surveys, the composition of those people matters enormously.

Imagine two different shareholder bases.

Now imagine the exact same company is owned by each group.

Would the stock behave the same way?

Probably not.

Because the holders themselves change the dynamics of price movement.

One group buys dips.
The other panics during them.

One group thinks in years.
The other thinks in days.

One group sees volatility as opportunity.
The other sees it as danger.

The business may be identical.

But the behavior of the owners is completely different.

This creates a fascinating possibility:

What if part of understanding future price movement is understanding:

Because if ownership transitions from:

the future behavior of the stock may change dramatically even if the company itself barely changes at all.

While I try to stay away from predictions, it’s an idea I’d love to explore more deeply someday.

One of the most important lessons in investing is that:

Price is:

all compressed into a single number.

And sometimes the biggest thing changing isn’t the business itself.

It’s the people interpreting it.

90% of AI content is noise. The AI Report is the 10%.

We cover real enterprise deployments, actual business outcomes, and the AI strategies leaders are betting on right now — not lab experiments, not demos, not speculation.

400,000+ executives, operators, and founders read us every weekday to cut through the clutter and make faster, smarter decisions about AI before their competitors do.

No hype. No fluff. Just the signal.

See what's actually working in AI across every industry right now — free, in 5 minutes a day.

Cut through the noise

61% of marketers say this is the biggest marketing shift in decades.

Get the data and trends shaping growth in 2026 with this groundbreaking state of marketing report.

Inside you’ll discover:

Download your 2026 state of marketing report today.

Get Your Report