Columbia Conference Surveys Impact of Media Coverage on Market Movement
Columbia Business School recently revealed findings about the Bank of America Merrill Lynch and JP Morgan Chase-sponsored 2nd Annual News and Finance Conference, which addressed the effects of media coverage on the world of finance.
The Program for Financial Studies’ News and Finance Initiative put together the conference, which hosted keynote speaker and Money.net CEO Morgan Downey, who advocated for a more expansive definition of financial news. “Financial news is anything that will move a market.” Downey pointed to an oil-related trade on which he “relied on tweets instead of traditional news sources.”
The conference also featured six research presentations about the accuracy of collective quarterly earnings estimations; how the press covers central bank communiqués; the predictive power of newspaper content on GDP growth; the effect of negative financial news on market assessments; the predictive insights of news coverage on global risk and stock returns, particularly changes in related asset prices and the connection between stronger sales and media exposure.
In addition to research presentations, the conference featured two panel discussions about the role of technology “and how it facilitates—or hinders—the spread of useful information” in their respective industries.
The first featured Financial Times columnist John Authers, CNBC senior economics reporter Steve Liesman; former Bloomberg Businessweek editor-in-chief Ellen Pollock and Wall Street Journal special writer Gregory Zuckerman.
The second featured a conversation between four finance-industry experts and practitioners: JP Morgan chief data science officer Graham Giller, Ph.D.; Morgan Stanley global head of AlphaWise Angus Lund; Thomson Reuters director of Research Sameena Shah, Ph.D. and Two Sigma Managing director Ben Wellington.
Both panels concurred: “The future of financial news is one where technology is enabling more and more news to be reported, and to be reported quickly, but where humans are helping to curate it and deliver it to the consumer in the ways in which the consumer wants.”
About the Author
Jonathan Pfeffer
Jonathan Pfeffer joined the Clear Admit and MetroMBA teams in 2015 after spending several years as an arts/culture writer, editor, and radio producer. In addition to his role as contributing writer at MetroMBA and contributing editor at Clear Admit, he is co-founder and lead producer of the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast. He holds a BA in Film/Video, Ethnomusicology, and Media Studies from Oberlin College.
