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 The best place to get a sense of how a company is doing is directly from the horses mouth. In this case, the horse is the management of a company. It speaks at least four times a year as required by the SEC via quarterly earnings reports, but everybody is already scrutinizing them. There is a venue that management speaks where you can gain an edge: analyst seminars. Here is why you should pay attention.

Not all companies participate in analyst seminars, but many of the bigger ones do. Large cap companies such as Dell and Intel hold analyst days when the company lays out strategy and presents financial numbers in front a bevy of analysts.

There is often new and market-moving information provided during these seminars. Obviously, corporate developments occur more frequently than four times a year, so these get-togethers are a prime place to disseminate new information to a group of analysts eager to hear new data points.

Thanks to the new rule, Regulation Fair Disclosure, analysts cannot gain access to material nonpublic information before the general public. In the past, many companies released important information in meetings and conference calls where shareholders and the general public were excluded. The goal of this rule is to even the playing field between individual investors and institutional investors.

In the past, these analyst seminars were held behind closed doors and individual investors would never get the privilege of hearing first-hand the precious information. It would be a serious disservice to you not to take advantage of the more level playing field that now exists courtesy of the Securities and Exchange Commission.

So how do you tune in? These days most of these seminars are available either through conference calls or live via streaming audio on the companys website. Before the advent of the internet, it would be impossible for us to follow these presentations. In many ways, the investing public of today doesnt know how lucky it is.

Of course, learning new information from management through analyst seminars is no investing panacea. It is simply one more piece in the puzzle of successful investing. The spoils will go to the investor who does his due diligence and keeps his mind and ears open. In this age of information, it is exactly that, information, which will enable the smaller investor to compete with the big boys, and management presentations are just one more way to obtain it.