Gadfly importance to democratic corporate governance is often underrated. We are currently under attack by the Business Roundtable (BRT) and others seeking to substantially raise the ownership threshold for submitting and resubmitting proposals. BRT, for example, contends proposals from small shareholder divert “significant time and resources to issues that, at best, have an attenuated connection to the […]
More beta is what investors should focus on order to increase long-term returns, argue Jim Hawley and Jon Lukomnik in their paper, The Long and Short of It: Are We Asking the Right Questions? – Modern Portfolio Theory and Time Horizons (download). That has also been the objective of Corporate Governance (CorpGov.net) since 1995. I […]
No, this article isn’t about becoming famous though the internet, the Sisters of the Sororitas, or Famulous Eateries in Bangkok. Rather, I just spent an hour on a Webinar with GMI Ratings on their Forensic Alpha Model (FAM), designed to help investors predict stock returns using forensic-accounting and governance-related measures of issuer risk. Yes, it was […]
Four articles worth reading are linked below. ProxyMonitor.org, a website sponsored by the Manhattan Institute’s Center for Legal Policy, sheds light on the influence of outside shareholder proposals on publicly traded corporations. Their slant is fairly obvious in their latest Proxy Monitor Report, Fall 2012, but the data is worth reviewing. (more…)