The battle over Main Street Investors could determine the future of the American economy for decades to come. According to Cydney Posner of Cooley PubCo, on one side are those who believe investors must focus on maximizing financial return and management knows best. On the other side are those who want to broaden the focus […]
Take Action: Bartlett Naylor of Public Citizen sent me the following draft sign-on comment letter to FASB/SEC regarding their concept release to redefine “materiality” from information that “could” be important to investors to information that “would” be considered important. If you agree with us that regulators shouldn’t be reducing the volume information that “could” be […]
Starbucks Corporation $SBUX, which operates as a roaster, marketer, and retailer of specialty coffee worldwide, is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on 3/18/2014. ProxyDemocracy.org had the votes of four funds (now more) when I checked and voted on 3/8/2015. I voted with management 81% of the time and assigned Starbucks a […]
Yahoo! $YHOO, is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is June 25, 2014. ProxyDemocracy.org had collected the votes of one fund when I checked and voted on 6/13/2014. I voted with the Board’s recommendations 56% of the time. Thus I assigned Yahoo! a proxy score of 62. View Proxy Statement. Read Warnings below. What follows are my recommendations […]
This is Part 2 of a post which started out reviewing the important thesis outlined in The Agency Costs of Agency Capitalism: Activist Investors and the Revaluation of Governance Rights by Ronald J. Gilson and Jeffrey N. Gordon (January 1, 2013). See Agency Capitalism: Corrective Measures Part 1 and Part 3. Current law encourages mindless indexing of portfolios and voting like lemmings […]
Apple ($AAPL) is one of the stocks in my portfolio. Their annual meeting is coming up on 2/27/2013. ProxyDemocracy.org had collected the votes of five funds when I checked on 2/19/2012. They listed the votes of six funds voting as of yesterday. I voted with management 46% of the time. View Proxy Statement. I voted, despite David Einhorn’s attempt to get an […]
The nation’s largest private water utility company has joined a federal lawsuit that aims to force the manufacturer of atrazine, a widely-used herbicide, to pay for its removal from drinking water. The class action lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Illinois alleging that Syngenta, Inc. made billions of dollars […]