Methods in Financial Communication

The course bridges communication and finance to introduce concepts, methods and tools for Financial Communication, understood broadly as communication about investment activities and aimed to inform investment decisions.  Financial communication ranges from the Investor Relations of public companies to the interpersonal communication between advisors and private investors in wealth management and encompassess the activities and practices of diverse information intermediaries such as securities analysts and financial journalists. 

The course includes the following modules: 

1. Markets and interaction:  A map of the financial markets as an interaction field, an overview of financial markets and real markets.
2. Information, communication and markets: Information and financial markets, signaling, information and intentions.
3. Relationship management and interpersonal communication:  From markets to products, the financial advisory process, interpersonal communication in financial advisory.
4. From communication to valuation: Quantitative and narrative aspects of firm valuation, how financial analysts write their reports, how a buy-side analyst works, how a venture capital investor works.
5. Financial media and news: Financial journalism and media relations in IR, the media and the financial markets, introducing the textual analysis of financial news and corporate disclosures.
6. Textual analysis: Manipulation of texts with corpus linguistic techniques, effective corpus building, frequencies and concordances analysis, collocations and statistics, data visualization.
   
    

The course will offer to the students the exposure to concepts, methods and practices of professional financial communication and financial communication research through discussion of examples, presentations by researchers and testimonies of professionals. More importantly, the students will practice skills and methods “hands on”, through a series of in-course activities, including:

• An in-class group exercise of firm valuation focusing on the blending of quantitative and narrative aspects in valuation and on the effective reporting of the analysis.
• An exercise of quantitative textual analysis of financial texts based on simple and transparent corpus linguistic methods.
• The AI based role-playing simulation of interpersonal communication in financial advisory dialogue based on the SkillGym method.

Through lectures, testimonies and activities, students will build an understanding of financial markets as a field of interaction, where relationships are maintained, commitments are taken and information is inferred from signaling behavior and disclosures in order to form a valuation of  investment opportunities and take investment decisions. These processes are carried out through a variety of specialized text genres and spoken interactions, many of which are public and contribute to a dramatically growing amount of written and spoken data. These “textual data” are systematically exploited by researchers, Investor Relations teams, investors and traders, for benchmarking with peers, identifying risks and predicting price movements.

In presence

The learning methods include lectures, guest lectures and testimonies, in-class groupwork including presentations and discussions, a quantitative analysis of a corpus of financial texts and training of interpersonal skills through role-playing simulation. 

In-course groupwork and assignments 40%

• In-class firm valuation groupwork including presentations and discussions based on the Valuation module of the course (15%).
• An individual paper presenting the results of an analysis of financial texts, according to the method illustrated throughout the Textual analysis module (15%)
• Training of interpersonal communication skills in financial advisory using the SkillGym role-playing simulation method presented in the Relationship management and interpersonal communication module (10%)  

Final written exam 60% (Computer based).

• The written exam includes open questions and exercises on the content of all course modules and on the required reading (Damodaran 2017). 

A detailed syllabus with full details on evaluation will be uploaded on iCorsi at the start of the course.