With XBRL, more IR jobs will go to communicators
THIS XBRL thing has legs. The hype-o-meter is in overdrive and I can’t imagine anything is going to stop it. So it’s now safe for me to tell you the awful, untold truth about what XBRL means to the investor relations profession as we know it today. This truth is so frightening to the average [...]
The future of NIRI…
AS A trained cynic, I look for what is not said in public statements more than what is said to get a sense of what the real news is. Case in point, the appointment of Jeff Morgan as the new CEO of the National Investor Relations Institute (NIRI). Here’s an extract from a Q&A prepared [...]
Look who's closing the governance gap
I’VE BEEN using Google’s email news alerts for years and have never bothered to unsubscribe them even though I get the same stuff via RSS. One of my alerts is for articles about corporate governance. It might just be my imagination, but I’m noticing an interesting trend in news articles that include the phrase “corporate [...]
540 IR website clients no one wants
HEMSCOTT IR, the UK-based investor relations website provider that claims 540 companies as clients, was sold yesterday by parent Ipreo Holdings LLC to U.S.-based investment research provider Morningstar, Inc. (NASDAQ:MORN).But it’s abundantly clear from the deal announcement that Morningstar doesn’t really care about the IR website business it is getting as part of a wider [...]
Think retail investors are irrelevant? The feeling's mutual
NO SURPRISE last week when Thomson Financial reported on a survey of investor relations officers that found just 18% are actively trying to attract new retail investors.IR Magazine has more on the survey, but it basically says that the U.S. investor relations community considers retail investors irrelevant. Well, there is another side to the story. [...]
My gibberish was first, no mine was
PERHAPS I shouldn’t be so flippant about XBRL, a technology that almost everyone seems to think is a big deal, but I’m more turned on by the offbeat side of events around the financial tagging language than the serious stuff. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably know that the XBRL U.S. GAAP [...]
Canada's top investor relations websites awarded
THE Canadian Institute of Chartered Accountants has awarded its Award of Excellence for Electronic Disclosure to oil and gas company Nexen Inc.Runner up in the annual awards for electronic disclosure, which I recently rated as among the most reliable of such awards programs, was past three-in-row winner PotashCorp, the international fertilizer company. (Disclosure: We have [...]
Is e-proxy voting tilted to management?
I WASN’T going to write about this because I’m trying to be more positive in my posts. But my arm has been twisted by TheCorporateCounsel.net editor Broc Romanek.In a blog post yesterday, Broc writes about his negative experiences visiting the websites of two companies that are doing e-proxies — Pike Electric and Itex. He sums [...]
Say-on-pay is yesterday's news
IT doesn’t take a genius to figure out that U.S. boards of directors and corporate executives are in for a rough time this coming proxy season.No one can be sure how the story in the stock market is going to play out, but with a month to go to year-end it looks increasingly like most [...]
SEC puts shareholder forums on agenda
THE U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is expected to vote on rule changes next week that will make it easier for companies and shareholders to use electronic forums, blogs, and other forms of social media for their shareholder meetings.At a meeting on Wednesday November 28, the commission will “consider whether to adopt amendments to the [...]
Are online annual reports a waste of money?
A RESPONDENT to our recent readership survey is unhappy with me because I refuse to admit that online annual reports are a waste of money. Actually, I’ve never been asked to admit this, but I’m glad they raised the issue because it gives me a chance to explain why we advise our clients to produce [...]
Lululemon takes the PR low road
Updated: Canada law enforcement agency moves against company, which agrees to pull “therapeutic and performance” claims from clothing tags. EARLIER this week, I wrote about how a short-seller had inspired The New York Times to conduct lab tests that found no evidence of seaweed content in clothing sold by Lululemon athletica (NASDAQ:LULU). In the prospectus [...]
Notes on the annual report webinar
WE’VE just wrapped up our webinar with the TheCorporateCounsel.net on how to produce usable online annual reports and proxy statements for the e-proxy era.We had three of the world’s leading online annual report producers together for the event — Patrick Heick from VSA Partners in Chicago, Ryan Lejbak from Zu.com in Saskatoon, and Thomas Rosenmayr [...]
Subscribe to feed