The outreach arm of a given (usually public) company.
It's someone who serves as the communications intermediary between the company's CFO and the rest of the investing world, i.e. more or less the owners of the company.
The IR person hosts the quarterly conference calls, files the proper filings, and answers generally inconsequential questions from investors which aren't so telling that they'd pierce the Regulation FD veil.
Think of the IR person as a kind of role like the Vice President of the U.S. Lots of good coffee and nice seats at the table, but little say in what actually happens.
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Finance: What is the Investment Advisers...32 Views
Finance a la shmoop. What is the Investment Advisors Act of 1940? [The question written on a blackboard]
All right well a whole lot of acting going on in that 1940 there, best actor Robert [1940s black and white film]
Donat best actress Vivien Leigh, best investment Act yeah this one well too
many poor uneducated folks got taken in the market gyrations of the wild stock [Girl looking offended]
market in the decade and changed before this act happened. So Congress then set
out a whole bunch of standards under which Investment Advisers must act yeah [Documents from the act]
see where we got that whole acting thing all right for example investment [The title of the act is highlighted]
advisors with more than 25 million bucks under their care must register with the [Advisor next to a big sack of money]
SEC making all of their actions quote aboveboard unquote and making it much
harder for fast-talkin city slickers to abscond with the hard-earned savings of [Adviser taking money away from people]
ma and pa farmer. Well the Act also outlined the structure under which
advisors can charge fees and it created the then path-breaking notion that an
investment advisor must put the interests of their client ahead of their [Advisor interests above client interests is swapped around]
own personal interests and this was like a thing back then yeah it sounds
shocking like you wouldn't need to explicitly state this in a modern polite
normal society but in fact the wild world of that era while the notion that [People at a show in the 40s]
you could not in fact actively steal your clients money so now is considered
liberalism go figure... [Liberalism stamp]
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