Democratizing the earnings call
INVESTORS in US-listed stocks will notice something different this quarter when they visit Yahoo! Finance to catch up on the latest corporate earnings results. For the first time, they will have free access to full-text transcripts of earnings conference calls on approximately 2,500 companies thanks to Seeking Alpha, a firm started by former Wall Street [...]
Use Google to publish your investor presentations
INVESTOR presentations on corporate websites are hugely valuable content, but they are often extraordinarily hard to use. Now, thanks to Google, there’s a dead easy, completely free, and reasonably reliable way to modestly improve the usability of your online investor presentations. As announced by the Google Docs team on Friday afternoon, the new Google Presentations [...]
Google Finance adds company events, news RSS
GOOGLE Finance has just been upgraded in the past few hours to add information on company events like earnings call webcasts and upcoming events that integrate with Google Calendar. The screenshot below shows the new Events module on the Google Finance page for Zimmer Holdings, Inc. By clicking on the webcast links, you can access [...]
Transcripts a sign of transparency
WHY don’t more companies provide transcripts of their earnings conference calls and investor presentations on their websites? Of the 525 large-cap companies whose websites we review, only 12% are currently providing transcripts of their earnings calls on their investor relations websites. It’s NOT because investors don’t want them. There wouldn’t be a transcript industry if [...]
The most-hyped technologies for IR in 2006
LOOKING back on 2006, which technologies relevant to investor relations failed to live up to the hype that surrounded them? Fortunately, the list is short because IR websites were not the scene of much innovation during 2006. Relatively few new technologies even registered a blip among the 525 sites in our survey. Some of the [...]
Use links instead of directions in new releases
MANY IR news releases waste investors’ time unnecessarily because companies don’t provide direct links to webcasts and other information on their websites. Look at the screenshot below of restaurant chain Denny’s (NASDAQ: DENN) recent announcement about its upcoming earnings call. The sentences I’ve highlighted tell investors how to find the call on the company’s website. [...]
Hey Google, where’s the YouTube video of your earnings call?
I’M HAVING a bit of fun here, but shouldn’t the quintessential Web company be just a little more hip to using new technologies in its communications with investors? Google Inc. — which just acquired web video sensation YouTube for $1.65 billion — webcasted it earnings call yesterday using investor relations website outsourcing service Shareholder.com, a [...]
The state of podcasting in investor relations
AT THE recent 2nd Annual Podcast & Portable Media Expo in Ontario, California, three men stood up to talk about podcasting in investor relations. Only problem was that almost no one came to hear them. According to Jason Lee Miller of news website WebProNews, the “presenters were nearly speaking to echoes in the conference room.” [...]
The perfect earnings release for 2006
WHY do companies issue full-text earnings releases via newswire services? Except for bloating the bottom lines of the newswires, who actually benefits from this practice? Sun Microsystems Inc.’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz has written to the SEC to ask the same thing. I’ve chimed in with how I think companies could do away with certain types [...]
Obscuring disclosure with bad format choices
OK, here’s what we know: Investors mostly access corporate reporting information online and they are mostly interested in financial statements. So why would a company post its financial statements on the Web in a format that makes it next to impossible to read or use online? Clearly they shouldn’t, yet that’s exactly what I was [...]
The case for conference call transcripts
IF THIS isn’t an established saying yet, then let this be the makings of one: CCBN knows a market opportunity when it sees one. The US giant of online services to investor relations departments and their audiences recently began selling its newest innovation in the gilded quarterly conference call market with something which investors can’t [...]
Preparing earnings releases for the web
Updated: Aug. 23, 2004 EARNINGS releases are important disclosure devices that should be written and formatted to make it easy for investors and the media to obtain essential material information as rapidly as possible. How you write and format your releases should reflect the realities of online behavior. Studies have found that the vast majority [...]
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