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Five Buy Side IR Pet Peeves

The third and final part in IR Magazine’s series of articles taken from a Q&A with the buy side at the IR Magazine Global Forum looks at “IR don’ts from the buy side“.

Below are five IR pet peeves that buy side experts shared;

Lack of Transparency – Marc St John Webb says “in smaller companies, a lot of company IROs or management, when they’re talking about their businesses, we’d like them to be a bit more transparent. We want to understand where the profitability is coming from and where it’s not coming from.”

Overly Complex Explanations – “IR really comes into importance is in times of trouble. When a company has to publish results that are poor and there’s not a natural macroeconomic explanation, where it’s an internal company explanation, we tend to find that companies are not explaining in simple-enough terms what went wrong. It’s often a series of excuses that’s hiding the real root cause of the problem and we’d love the IRO to help us with that” says Marc St John Webb.

Thin Gruel Narrative – Nicholas Melhuish says “One of my bugbears is what I call the ‘thin gruel narrative’ that people just can’t get [away from], where the IRO for whatever reason has a complete inability to really give you any context or depth in the narrative he/she has – though to be honest that doesn’t happen very often. That’s maybe a problem more from 10 years or 15 years ago when IR was more in its infancy than it is today.”

Blocking Access – Melhuish continues; “The other thing that really frustrates me… I understand that as an IRO you’re employed by the company, you’re working for the senior management and you’re an intermediary between us and them and therefore you get caught between different sets of priorities we often can’t see – but when access really feels like it’s just being blocked for whatever reason, it can be incredibly frustrating.”

Unresponsiveness – “The third thing I really hate – and I’m thinking of a particular company I’m invested in – is the lack of answering of any kind of emails and then always offering a conference call at 7.00 pm UK time on a Friday evening!” says Nicholas Melhuish.

Learn more HERE.