For your discussion, find two videos: one by a leading practitioner of finance, and one by a leading scholar. Examples of prestigious practitioners include legendary investors Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch. Some of top scholars of finance include William Sharpe, the original developer of the CAPM. The late Stephen Ross is the author of some of the readings for this class and is the developer of the concept of the arbitrage pricing theory. Other well-known finance scholars include Myron Scholes, Fisher Black, and Eugene Fama. You can also try to find videos from some of the authors of the articles that you are reviewing for your Case and SLP.

Post the link to both the practitioner’s video and the scholar’s video. Include a brief discussion of each video, and compare and contrast the content and style of each video. What do you see as the major differences between content and style of each video? Is it similar to the differences you found between practitioner and scholarly journal articles?

Module 5 – Background

Scholars vs. Practitioners

To start off this module, take a look at the following practitioner-oriented finance journals. These journals have a mix of opinion articles, statistical studies, and guidance and suggestions for financial practitioners. Below is a link to each of the journals’ home pages. To access the journals you will need to go Business Source Complete in the Trident Online Library (click “Additional Library Resources” at the bottom of the Online Classroom and Library section of the main TLC portal page). Note that articles from the past year are not always available in the library, but previous issues of these journals are. Take a look at both the general description of the journal as well as a few recent articles in each journal:

Journal of Applied Corporate Finance was originally started by the investment bank Morgan Stanley and covers a range of issues from the perspective of corporate financial strategies.

Journal of Portfolio Management covers financial issues from the point of view of the investor.

Financial Analysts Journal is the official journal of the CFA Institute, the organization that gives out the Certified Financial Analyst Certificate. Articles in this journal tend to be a bit more technical than articles in other practitioner journals.

Journal of Wealth Management presents research from a financial planning perspective.

Now that you’ve reviewed the practitioner-oriented journals, take a look at some of the academic finance journals that specialize in more scholarly and theory-oriented research.

Here are a couple of scholarly finance journals that are highly ranked and are available in Business Source Complete:

The Review of Financial Studies is one of the toughest finance journals in the world to get published in and has highly technical articles.

Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis: As you can probably tell its name, this journal also publishes highly technical papers.

For a list of additional prestigious scholarly finance journals, check out Google Scholar’s Top Publications in Finance list. Google Scholar is also a good way to find scholarly finance studies, as many of the papers are available online.

Check out at least a few articles from top-ranked scholarly journals in finance. You don’t have too read too much in depth, as these articles are often extremely complex. But try to get an idea of the kind of technical or theoretical articles they publish and see if you can find any articles that interest you.