Fund Votes 3/30/2022 Update
A number of funds announce their proxy votes in advance of corporate meetings. In preparation for voting this Spring, I updated links to pre-disclosing funds. I often find it helpful to see funds have voted before I cast my votes. Among the most helpful are Norges, Calvert, and Trillium, since all three are most likely to include notes explaining their voting rationale. Norges waits until 5 days before meetings to post their votes but, since they are a huge fund, they own stock in more companies than Trillium.
In a petition, I urged the SEC to require something close to real-time voting of all funds. (Rulemaking Petition for Real-Time Disclosure of Proxy Votes, SEC File 4-748, Jul. 9, 2019) Although the SEC recently proposed that fund voting be reported in machine-readable format, that does not appear to have set off a competition around voting. In fact, fewer funds are announcing their votes in advance of shareholder meetings than did a few years ago. Now, only those marked by asterisks on our list appear to do so. We hope that will change when the rules are adopted and awareness of proxy voting records increases.
If funds actually vote with beneficial owners in mind, they would not be ashamed of how they vote. See this post from October 1995. I updated links for the Fund Votes 3/30/2022.
Report Other Brave Funds
Pensions & Investments (P&I), Winning over proxy voters, argues that pensions have a fiduciary duty to announce their proxy votes in advance of the annual general meeting (AGM) if doing so is likely to influence the vote. This minor extension of current practice could have a profound impact and should also apply to mutual funds and investment advisors, as well as other institutional investors, such as endowments.
If you learn of funds that routinely post their proxy votes in advance, please let us know.
Fund Votes 3/30/2022: Related Posts
Fiduciary Duty to Announce Votes (Part 1): Editorial Calls For Advanced Disclosure
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