January 2, 2012 – 9:04 pm
Happy new year. A chatty column in the Financial Times, “Three cheers for new year trepidation,” touches on a central issue for investor relations in 2012: How should companies communicate with shareholders about what we can’t foresee? Citing the obvious risks in trying to predict what will happen in a fragile global economy, FT management editor [...]
December 19, 2011 – 11:14 pm
Private companies contemplating an IPO – and small caps debating whether it’s worth it to stay public – sometimes tally up the costs of complying with Sarbanes-Oxley, filing SEC reports, releasing earnings and so on. Now Ernst & Young has gathered data from 26 companies that did IPOs in the past two years to come up with an [...]
October 14, 2011 – 2:27 pm
Andrew Ross Sorkin, the New York Times M&A columnist, CNBC “Squawk Box” co-host and author of Too Big to Fail, says we’re kidding ourselves when we say we want corporate leaders to think long-term. The problem, he says, is all of us. “We are the ultimate ADD society,” Sorkin said today in a speech to [...]
September 27, 2011 – 10:30 am
In the “things could be worse” category: Unless you work for Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo! or News Corporation, your company isn’t discussed in “The Worst Board in America,” a video by Thomson Reuters tech correspondent Peter Lauria. “There’s basically a race to the bottom. They’re all dysfunctional in their own way,” Lauria says of the trio of [...]
September 15, 2011 – 3:05 pm
I hate to go all morose and contrarian on another “up” day in the markets, but … Jerome Booth, research director of London-based emerging markets specialist Ashmore Investment Management, makes an interesting point in a Sept. 14 Financial Times column. He posits that global markets are moving, slogging really, through the classic five stages of grief. When [...]
September 13, 2011 – 8:45 am
If you’re not already doing an “analyst day” every year or two, maybe you should be. That’s my takeaway from “NIRI Survey Reveals Current Analyst/Investor Day Practices” - a benchmarking study released Monday by NIRI. Key finding: 71% of the 431 investor relations professionals responding to NIRI’s survey hold a periodic analyst/investor day. It’s a chance [...]
August 16, 2011 – 10:48 am
A quote of the day for investor relations professionals, from National Investor Relations Institute President and CEO Jeff Morgan in his “IR Weekly” email and blog post under the heading “Market Mayhem”: Market volatility reached new extremes last week as we experienced global market moves of positive to negative 5% from one day to the next. [...]
August 10, 2011 – 2:36 pm
While the markets are going crazy, Jamie Dimon, chairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase & Co., is out visiting bank customers and employees on a bus tour in California – and giving an interview today with CNBC. His core message: Cheer up, America! That’s not bad advice for investor relations folks, either. Dimon doesn’t mince words about shortcomings [...]
August 8, 2011 – 12:07 pm
The President has pulled into the lead, ahead of a three-way tie among the Treasury secretary, “Other” (write-ins Ben Bernanke, Paul Volcker, Bill Clinton and “Someone who’s fluent in Chinese“) and “Oh, never mind!” What do you think? Not a political comment … just a little comic relief amid wild days in the markets.
Are we in recession again? Weak recovery? Heading for Financial Crisis 2.0? No wonder more than a few CFOs and IROs have been wringing their hands over what guidance to provide investors as part of the second-quarter reporting season. If you’re looking for an example of softening guidance by widening the range, Procter & Gamble [...]
