Investor relations text-books. Review.

I would like to thank everyone who sent me their recommendations of the investor relations text-books. I would like to provide a short overview of the ones I already looked at.

1. Marcus & Wallace. New dimensions in investor relations. Pretty decent books. Some chapters are quite good - the chapter 1 as an intro into IR can do the job. Chapter 3 - review of audiences involved in investor relations (analysts, portfolio managers, lawyers, etc.) - is based on a good idea but classification is somewhat confusing and descriptions of characters do not add any value. We need to know what their goal and how to deal with them. Other chapters I did not find very useful. Some of them are simply irrelevant at this point in time such as chapter 6 - computer in investor relations. But the old age of the book is clearly noticeable in many other chapters as well; after all, the book was published in 1997. The big drawback of the book - no discussion of measuring and evaluating effectiveness of the investor relations program - yet, this should be the cornerstone of any professional education.

2. Ryan & Jacobs Using investor relations to maximize equity valuation. I would not recommend this book because of the information presented and the language used. It starts quite nicely with a part describing various players relevant to investor relations from sell-side to the mass media. These are pretty decent chapters. After that the book reads as a sale-pitch to promote the authors' own investor relations agency. Out of 25 chapters in the book, only one talks about actually how to do investor relations - chapter 13 - Positioning IR to succeed. Following chapters are often repetitive to early chapters in the book - like in Chapter 24, Event Management, we return back to overview of capital markets players and talk about analysts, short-sellers, etc. and then talk about guidance (despite the fact that there is a separate chapter about guidance). I find the second part of the book very confusing and poorly structured. And again not a word about measurement and evaluation.

3. Rieves & Lefebvre Investor relations for the emerging company. Again, somewhat outdated book as it was published back in 2002. Yet, it seems to have a good structure. Part one defines investor relations, players on the market, and investing theories. However, the focus is on micro-cap; it is appropriate for the book about emerging company, but maybe not so much for a general IR course. Part 2 talks about disclosure. Part 3 discusses some random bits and pieces of the investor relations practices - conference calls, news releases, presentations, etc. I wish it talked more about overall strategy rather than specific examples. And I wish it would talk significantly more about measurement and evaluation - it has half a page where it simply lists financial metrics for measuring company's performance rather than investor relations effectiveness.

If I had to choose out of these three books, I would probably go with the last one - Investor relations for the emerging company. But maybe there is something else out there?..