Recent articles

The week in investor relations: ESG flows, US-China tension and stock splits

Aug 14, 2020

- Sustainable investment funds continued to see strong inflows during the second quarter of the year, according to the Financial Times (paywall). Between April and June, such funds saw net inflows of $71.1 bn, said the newspaper, citing data from Morningstar. - The world’s largest asset managers are pushing up volatility in company stocks, according to new academic research, t...

Small cap

Study shows extent of 13F rule change proposal’s impact

Aug 13, 2020

Ben Ashwell

Study shows extent of 13F rule change proposal’s impact

A proposed SEC rule change that would allow almost 90 percent of investors in US public companies not to make 13F filings will have an outsized effect on small and micro cap issuers’ ability to identify their shareholders, according to analysis of the Russell 3000 by IHS Markit. The proposed rule change – which pro...

ESG

Advisory intelligence: Social issues expected to dominate ESG discussions

Aug 13, 2020

NASDAQ

Advisory intelligence: Social issues expected to dominate ESG discussions

Sponsored content Almost half of issuers (45 percent) expect social issues to be more of a focus in upcoming investor engagements than in the past, according to a recent poll of attendees at Nasdaq’s annual IR Forum. Whereas environmental and governance issues have been at the forefront of ESG interactions with investors in recent years, th...

Corporate access

Wednesday Winner: More meetings with European investors

Aug 12, 2020

Ben Ashwell

Wednesday Winner: More meetings with European investors

The investor relations team at Wix is used to remote communications with its management team. Although the IR team is US-based, the management team is at the company’s headquarters in Tel Aviv. In this video interview, Maggie O’Donnell, director of investor relations and joint winner of the rising star award at last year’s IR Magazine Awards – US, describes how her interactions with management have changed since the Covid-19 outbreak – including how they�...

ESG

ESG ratings: How the weighting scheme affects performance

Aug 12, 2020

Linda-Eling Lee

Zoltán Nagy

ESG ratings: How the weighting scheme affects performance

This article first appeared on MSCI.com. We examined three approaches to creating a combined ESG score: equal weighting, optimization using historical data and industry-specific weights, represented by MSCI ESG Ratings In the short term, we found that both equal-weighted and optimized approaches performed better because they had highe...

Small cap

A look at SPACs: From the 90s to Covid-19

Aug 11, 2020

Devin Sullivan

A look at SPACs: From the 90s to Covid-19

For many executives, going public signals to the world that your business has grown and is now ready for the bright lights of a national exchange. Ironically, the largest obstacle to achieving this objective can be the IPO process itself – time, expense, market conditions and global events can often combine to discourage even the most promising candidates from pursuing a public listing via the traditional route. Covid-19 has added new layers of uncertainty to th...

Buy side

Japan’s governance evolution continues despite Covid-19 impact

Aug 11, 2020

Tim Human

Japan’s governance evolution continues despite Covid-19 impact

Since 2014, when Prime Minister Shinzo Abe introduced a stewardship code, Japanese companies have found themselves under sustained pressure to up their corporate governance practices. Despite the spread of Covid-19, that pressure has remained high in 2020, with a record number of shareholder proposals filed during the Japanese AGM season. Below, we speak with Shigeo Imakiire, president of Investor Communications Japan (ICJ), a joint venture of Broadridge an...

Case studies

IR Objectives & Challenges report now available

Aug 10, 2020

Staff Writers

IR Objectives & Challenges report now available

IR Magazine has released a new report highlighting both the challenges IR teams have faced and objectives they have focused on throughout 2019 and 2020. The report also looks at how investors view the challenges facing IR over this period. Findings are based on the IR Magazine Global IR Survey conducted in Q1 2020 and the IR Magazine Global Investor Survey conducted in Q4 2019. This report breaks down the challenges and objectives identified into internal c...

Shareholder targeting & ID

Spac IPOs hit record level

Aug 10, 2020

Tim Human

Special purpose acquisition companies (Spacs) are truly having their moment. By early August, the number of Spac IPOs so far in 2020 had overtaken the total number for the whole of last year. Amid the volatility caused by Covid-19, Spac listings offer a way to go public without the risk and complexity of a traditional IPO. Meanwhile, investors have been drawn to the seemingly low-risk model of Spac vehicles, where the money is held in a trust account until an acqu...

Activism

The threat of employee shareholder activism

Aug 07, 2020

Ben Ashwell

The threat of employee shareholder activism

Boardrooms across the country are increasingly discussing human capital management issues, as investors bring subjects like diversity and inclusion, employee safety, retention and engagement into focus. With so many CEOs of US companies signing the Business Roundtable statement on stakeholder value, and Covid-19 raising legitimate concerns about employee safety, companies can expect greater scrutiny of how they treat their employees in the future. The majority of sh...

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