Module 5 – SLP

Scholars vs. Practitioners

For this assignment, choose an article from one of the practitioner journals that includes some use of data from the stock market or company financials. No need to find an article with a lot of fancy statistics, but the article should involve some type of numbers and data that you can find online from Yahoo Finance or other Web pages with financial data on publicly-traded corporations. If one of the papers from your Module 5 Case meets this description, you can use it for this assignment as well.

Once you have found an article that meets this description, try your hand at repeating some of the calculations or analysis in the article. Again, no need to do any fancy statistics. Just take a stab at using financial data either from the Internet or even financial data from your workplace if it is available, and apply the techniques from this article to the data you find.

For example, if the article proposes a new way to look at financial ratios for a given company, then look up the financial ratios for a major corporation on Yahoo Finance. Or if the article discusses new ways to pick stocks to invest in, try picking some stocks based both on the methods proposed in the article as well as information that you find online about different companies. Again, no need to do any fancy statistics but at least find some data and do some simple analysis of the data based on the article you found.

Your paper should be 3–5 pages and should include:

1. An overview of the analysis technique that you found in the article.
2. Your calculations and data presented in an organized and easy to understand manner.
3. Discussion about the results and implications of your analysis.

SLP Assignment Expectations

• Answer the assignment questions directly.
• Stay focused on the precise assignment questions. Do not go off on tangents or devote a lot of space to summarizing general background materials.
• For computational problems, make sure to show your work and explain your steps.
• For short answer/short essay questions, make sure to reference your sources of information with both a bibliography and in-text citations. See the Student Guide to Writing a High-Quality Academic Paper, including pages 11-14 on in-text citations. Another resource is the “Writing Style Guide,” which is found under “My Resources” in the TLC Portal.

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.