Dr James Bowden

Lecturer

Accounting and Finance

Personal statement

Since joining Strathclyde Business School in 2019, my research and teaching activities have primarily focussed on different areas of financial technology (fintech). My research activities involve utilisation of textual analysis methods to investigate the extent to which investors and observers respond to sentiment expressed in company filings, news reporting, and social media. For example, previous research investigating the links between Reddit activity and cryptocurrency trading has been published in Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money, while another paper investigating the relationship between news reporting and economic sentiment indicators has been published in the Journal of Comparative Economics. I have also previously published in the European Journal of Finance.

Alongside research, my commentary on current financial events has been published by The Conversation UK, the World Economic Forum, MarketWatch and Business Insider.

I am actively engaged in teaching and have twice been shortlisted for the "Best in Faculty - Business" award at the Strathclyde Teaching Excellence Awards. I currently co-direct the MSc Financial Technology programme, and teach the newly created Financial Innovations, Applications and Considerations module. I have led the honours year Corporate Financing module since joining Strathclyde, and supervise both undergraduate and postgraduate dissertations/projects.

Prior to commencing my PhD, I worked for four years as a Senior Stock Research Analyst and Index Supervisor at Russell Investments (now FTSE Russell), and undertook an Internship at Merrill Lynch in Illinois during the fall-out of the Global Financial Crisis. I have also taught modules at the University of Dundee and worked as a Knowledge Transfer Associate at Bangor University. Outside of academia I enjoy athletics and am a keen road, cross-country and hill runner.

Qualifications

PhD in Accounting and Finance, University of Dundee

MSc in Investment Analysis, University of Stirling

BA (Hons) in International Business, Nottingham Trent University

 

Publications

Sentiment and trading decisions in an ambiguous environment : a study on cryptocurrency traders
Bowden James, Gemayel Roland
Journal of International Financial Markets, Institutions and Money Vol 80 (2022)
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.intfin.2022.101622
Illuminating craft brewers' experiences of dealing with Covid-19 and making fresh sense of what Covid-19 can do to/for craft beer : an intègraphic approach
Clarke Daniel, Bowden James, Dinnie Keith
Researching Craft Beer Understanding Production, Community and Culture in an Evolving Sector (2021) (2021)
https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80043-184-320211004
A taxonomy of FinTech innovation
Bowden James, King Timothy, Koutmos Dimitrios, Rodrigues Loncan Tiago, Lopes Francesco Saverio Stentella
Disruptive Technology in Banking and Finance (2021) (2021)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-81835-7_3
Economy through a lens : distortions of policy coverage in UK national newspapers
Bowden James, Kwiatkowski Andrzej, Rambaccussing Dooruj
Journal of Comparative Economics Vol 55, pp. 3094-3111 (2019)
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jce.2019.07.002
Rumours built on quicksand : evidence on the nature and impact of message board postings in modern equity markets
Bowden James, Burton Bruce, Power David
European Journal of Finance Vol 24, pp. 544-564 (2018)
https://doi.org/10.1080/1351847X.2017.1288647

More publications

Teaching

I have been co-director of the MSc Financial Technology at Strathclyde Business School since 2019. I am also responsible for delivering the Corporate Financing module for honours year students and the Fintech Innovations, Applications and Considerations postgraduate module. Each year I supervise end-of-year financial technology projects for postgraduate students, and finance-related undergraduate honours year dissertations. I previously taught the Future of Fintech module for the MSc Strategic Fintech in Bahrain.

I have been shortlisted for "Best in Faculty - Business" at the Strathclyde Teaching Excellence Awards in 2021 and 2022.

Research interests

My research explores various aspects of financial technology and includes working with novel unstructured datasets such as text, audio and images to establish how investors respond to the manner in which information is conveyed. However, I also conduct research in more traditional areas of corporate finance and financial history.

I am first supervisor for two doctoral students: Andrew Todd is conducting research into multimodal sentiment analysis of corporate earnings calls. Phindu Lipenga is investigating the determinants of fintech adoption in Sub-Saharan Africa. I am also second supervisor for Zihong Chen, who is conducting research into the effectiveness of machine learning algorithms for the detection of money laundering.

I have previously acted as reviewer for manuscripts submitted to the European Journal of Finance and Qualitative Research in Financial Markets.

Professional activities

Interview: Digital art and the NFT revolution
Interviewee
25/5/2021
NFTs are much bigger than an art fad – here’s how they could change the world
Contributor
26/4/2021
Amsterdam ousts London as Europe’s top share hub, taking trading back to where it all began
Contributor
12/2/2021
GameStop: hedge fund attacks have opened up powerful new front against Wall Street
Contributor
29/1/2021

More professional activities

Projects

Enhancing sustainable finance with satellite data and advanced analytics
Liu, Bin (Principal Investigator) Bowden, James (Co-investigator) Riccardi, Annalisa (Co-investigator)
01-Jan-2021 - 30-Jan-2022
A Novel Measure of Individual Influence in Social Media Networks
Clark, Ruaridh (Principal Investigator) Egan, Kieren (Principal Investigator) Bowden, James (Co-investigator)
We plan to model influence within social media networks using methods employed in engineering and network science. In doing so, we can potentially reduce the impact of noise interactions which have typically affected studies testing for causal relationships between social media and external factors. For example, this sophisticated approach to influence detection can provide a new method for weighting online sentiment, collected from Twitter, from which relationships with financial market activity, political events, and healthcare policy may be tested.
In particular, we use financial time series to test the predictive power of our influence-weighted social media sentiment. Although previous studies in academic finance have investigated the extent to which online interactions between investors can affect financial trading activity, the findings of such studies are often accompanied by high error terms and thus no consensus has been reached. Our measure may provide a solution to this issue, while also offering a methodological contribution that is of interest to academics in computer science.
11-Jan-2019 - 31-Jan-2020

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