Founded in 1969, NIRI is the professional association of corporate officers and investor relations consultants responsible for communication among corporate management, shareholders, securities analysts and other financial community constituents. The largest professional investor relations association in the world, NIRI’s more than 4,000 members represent 2,000 publicly held companies and $5.4 trillion in stock market capitalization.

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Thoughts from the Largest Annual Gathering of Investor Relations Professionals

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Thoughts from the Largest Annual Gathering of Investor Relations Professionals

Greetings from San Diego and the 2010 NIRI Annual Conference! As I write this we are midway through the Conference program. It has been an excellent program so far with much buzz around the great discussion and sharing among attendees as well as the several product announcements that have been made. For those of you unable to attend, we look forward to providing you with “nuggets of wisdom” in several forms over the next few weeks. I think everyone appreciated Monday’s speech and Q&A session with Meredith Cross, SEC Director of Corporation Finance. She kicked off Conference and set a great tone for the week in her comment that IROs play a crucial role in restoring confidence in our capital markets through effective investor communications.

Congress and the Senate took last week off for their Memorial Day recess, so I will only touch on the financial regulatory reform as it is all just chatter until the conference committee gets underway. However, Congressman Barney Frank, who is chairing the conference committee, has vowed that there will be no secret conference sessions between House and Senate members and all debates and votes will be conducted in opening meetings. This would be very unique for Washington and I look forward to see if others share his view.

While Congress is on recess, the SEC held a market structure roundtable with market participants sharing views on issues such as flash trading, market trading strategies, the flash crash, market fragmentation and other relevant issues. Missing from the roundtable discussion were the views of individual investors and issuers. With some of the dialogue becoming very contentious, I think the SEC has their work cut out for them to decide how best to improve the regulation to benefit all capital markets participants. However, it has become clear to me (and others) that status quo market regulation is not acceptable.

In other capital markets news, NASDAQ OMX Group announced its own methodology for circuit breakers. The NASDAQ scheme dubbed “volatility guard” will go beyond an SEC pilot program to place a trading delay on individual stocks that drop more than 10% in five minutes. The NASDAQ program looks to create trading pauses based upon volatility and stock price tiers for all NASDAQ listed stocks. Mechanisms for slowing trading during high volatility already exist at the NYSE. I suspect the SEC will seek to create some consistency among all exchanges and other trading venues so I look for the SEC to ultimately mandate the same action by all trading venues. As this will take some time, NASDAQ’s immediate move makes good sense.

Completely unrelated, but still in the capital markets category, I got a big smile from news last week of a Starbucks kiosk opening on the floor of the NYSE to “enhance the trading floor experience,” as one NYSE official put it.

As I close this week, I encourage Conference attendees to visit with exhibitors, along with attending all the great educational programs and engaging in the peer to peer interaction opportunities unique to this event. Exhibitors are a critical part of the educational experience and have tremendous knowledge and experience to share. Finally, for those who follow me on twitter or in my weekly blog, I was pleased to have the opportunity to stop by an IR “tweetup” at Conference. It is great to see NIRI members coming together to discuss IR, and so glad to see this informal gathering happening here. Social media is alive and well among some of the NIRI faithful.

Until next week,

Jeff Morgan, CAE
President & CEO
jmorgan@niri.org
www.twitter.com/jeffreydmorgan

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National Investor Relations Institute

Thoughts from the Largest Annual Gathering of Investor Relations Professionals