Briefing – The value of IR in an increasingly passive investment landscape

Most people probably don’t understand the full extent of the use of rare earth elements in their daily lives. For Pete Gardner, CFO at Rainbow Rare Earths, the London-listed mining company, explaining just how extensive their applications are is a daily conversation with shareholders and analysts.

Imagine an IPO timeline measured in weeks, not months, where your IR team crafts and delivers a compelling equity story from initial analyst briefing to the opening bell, before investor sentiment moves and the IPO window closes.

What does it take to become an award-winning IRO? Scott Parsons, a former sell-side analyst who joined the IR team at Alamos Gold in 2013, working his way up to lead the program, knows that a lot of it is hard work. But successful IR is also about honing your organizational skills, your people skills and your ability to package up the company story in a way that makes it work for investors and analysts. Here, we dive into the IR program at Alamos Gold to hear about everything from the sell-side to IR learning curve, the way ESG conversations…

Gregg Lampf, head of IR at Ciena, is a familiar face at IR Impact events. He’s also a big advocate for AI for investor relations – a topic he talks about, writes about and puts to work in his day job.

When Robert Eccles wrote a piece called Grift capitalism: The GOP’s brilliant strategy for ripping off ordinary Americans, it received the usual dose of online hate mail. It also led to a challenge: if you can find a conservative that thinks sustainability is good for capital markets, will you stop ‘writing nasty stuff’ about Republicans? That led him to the position he speaks from today: a liberal ex-hippy who has found common ground with the so-called ‘eco right’. Eccles, a well-known author and lecturer who has been writing about non-financial metrics since the early 1970s, had already become frustrated with…

‘Investors, analysts – everyone in financial markets – is consulting a vast amount of increasing data sources to inform their investment decisions,’ said Laurie Havelock, IR Impact editor, kicking off the recent briefing that brought together Jesse Rose, head of IR at Reddit, Dave Bezanson, vice president of IR and pensions at EMERA and Christopher Napolitano, account executive at AlphaSense, the event partner. While data opens up a world of insights, Havelock pointed to the added pressure it brings when IROs must distil everything that is out there into something they can deliver to the board. This, said Napolitano, is…

When asked for an example of a time she really leaned into her skills honed on the sell side, Bonita To, director of investor relations at First Quantum Minerals, points to a unique situation: the shutting down of one of the firm’s mines by the Panamanian government in November 2023. ‘The balance sheet became quite distressed and it was very apparent that we would need to take some action in terms of addressing our liquidity constraints – including going to the capital markets,’ she recalls.

Earlier this year, Andrea James – the IR Impact Award-winning former investor relations lead at Axon – talked to us about taking a sabbatical from investor relations as she sought a new role. Having taken time to herself, then taken time think about what her next move might look like, she manifested a CFO position at a small cap. That small cap is Nasdaq-listed precision diagnostics firm Oncocyte. Here James talks to IR Impact about the skills you need to make the move from IR to CFO, what she looks for from her advisers and why stock-picking and finance appealed…