What is Key to Integrating Op Risk?
“It’s critical to unite multiple perspectives on risk,” said Brenda Boultwood, Senior Vice President at MetricStream, “even though approaches to risk and compliance can be very different” throughout an organization. Boultwood was the second of two speakers at a webinar on operational risk held on August 27, 2015, sponsored by the Global Association of Risk Professionals. A common framework will require standard taxonomies, common definitions, and consistent risk assessment across a company, said Boultwood. She sketched out an integrated enterprise risk management (ERM) framework, in which all types of risk share a common hierarchy, common business processes, and a common […]
Is it OpRisk? or Business Risk?
Operational risk has figured prominently in the business news this summer: a lightning storm destroyed cloud data stored by Google, and a cyber-hack of dating website Ashley Madison breached confidentiality of 33 million accounts. Are companies addressing operational risk the best way possible? What is called operational risk may in fact have its roots in business risk, according to Mike Finlay, Chief Executive of RiskBusiness International. He was the first of two speakers at a webinar on operational risk held on August 27, 2015, sponsored by the Global Association of Risk Professionals. For example, the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster in […]
Conference Call Tones. Part 2
Click here to visit Part 1. Interview with S. McKay Price, continued. Q: In the introduction to your paper on textual analysis of conference call tones, you describe a 2012 conference call in which David Einhorn grilled the management team of Herbalife, thereby causing the shares to fall 20 percent in price. Did you run the transcript of this conference call through your call tone algorithm, and if so, was it the most negative sample in the set? 2012 was not in our sample period so we did not specifically create tone measures for that Herbalife call. Although I suppose […]
Conference Call Tones. Part 1
“Spin,” said Morty. “It’s all about spin.” He pointed to the web interface where he was listening to a certain equipment manufacturing company try to explain anomalies in their reported expenses. Like hyenas, the analysts were picking apart the footnotes. Turning to me, Morty said, “These scoundrels are masters of Orwellian doublespeak,” and then he exited the call. About a year later, I chanced upon research that looks into actual word usage during earnings conference calls. Three authors, Paul Brockman, Xu Li, and S. McKay Price, examined transcripts from nearly three thousand such calls. One of the authors is interviewed […]
“Well Worth The Trouble”
How well positioned are you for the job market in a softening economic environment? Possessing the chartered financial analyst designation, known as the CFA charter, sends a strong signal to potential employers, said Chris Polson, President of the CFA Society Toronto, which is part of the global CFA Institute. He was speaking at the webinar “Capital Markets Compensation Trends” on August 11, 2015, sponsored by CFA Society Toronto. The goals of the webinar were twofold: to recap the value underlying the charterholder designation, and whether this was reflected in the remuneration of Canadian charterholders, as shown by the results of […]