For decades, investors have recognized the importance of good corporate governance as a contributor to a company’s long-term prospects. Recent years have seen a growing consensus that good environmental stewardship can enhance returns, as well...
GameStop stock jumped Friday after the videogame retailer said that based on preliminary results , two nominees from an activist investor group were elected to its board of directors. Kurtis Wolf and Paul Evans, who were nominated by Hestia Capital Partners and Permit Capital Enterprise Fund, will join the company’s 10-person board. The group beneficially owns 7.3% of GameStop (ticker: GME) shares outstanding...
This proxy season, annual meetings are going virtual, companies have discovered their kinder selves amid a pandemic, and once-quiescent investors are more vocal about corporate accountability...
“Berkshire needs an activist,” says Bill Smead, the lead manager of the Smead Value fund, which counts Berkshire Hathaway among its top 10 holdings. Smead’s comments reflect the frustration of some Berkshire Hathaway shareholders who complain that CEO Warren Buffett has been too cautious during the recent market turmoil...
Boeing hosts its annual shareholder meeting on Monday. The timing is a little odd—the meeting comes before first-quarter numbers get reported on Wednesday . (Usually earnings come before annual meetings.) The meeting likely will generate some news and potentially some controversy. But the news won’t be about Covid-19 , the aerospace downturn , or the troubled 737 MAX . Those topics will have to wait until Wednesday...
Office REIT Mack-Cali said it does not plan to renominate four Bow Street-nominated directors to its board...
Moody’s chopped its rating on SoftBank Group debt by two notches Wednesday. The move came as a surprise to the Japanese telecom giant, which responded by asking Moody’s to withdraw all of its ratings on the company , arguing that the ratings agency has “biased and mistaken views.” The spat comes at a surprising moment. SoftBank shares (ticker: SFTBY) have had a big run over the last few days, up 55% since Friday...
Amid a long-running bull market, it can be easy to forget that trust in our market system is built on the subtle rules that guide interactions. Now, a crucial investor safeguard is under attack by the very institution whose mission it is to protect investors and promote transparency...
Parsing CEO pay can be a chore. It’s broken down by base salary, target bonuses, target long term incentive awards, pensions, separate milestones and signing bonuses. It’s Byzantine. It’s enough to say American CEOs are well compensated...
The early hours of the new trading year haven’t been any friendlier to Canadian cannabis stocks. Shares of all the biggest names, aside from Hexo , were down more than 4% just before 2 p.m. on Thursday. Aurora Cannabis stock (ticker: ACB) was down 6%, a bad start for a stock that’s shed 60% of its value in the past year...
Hedge-fund investor Richard Merage is taking some money from his, uh, hot pockets and pushing for change at Groupon...
Xerox Holdings’ bid for HP Inc. has become nastier, with the company now threatening a hostile takeover bid to combine the printer companies...
Trying to understand executive pay is a guaranteed descent into lunacy. How much pay is too much—or not enough? When does pay incentivize performance—and when does it spawn complacency? Can CEOs be aligned with shareholders by dousing them in stock options? Isn’t excessive pay analogous to certain addictive substances—the more you get, the more you need? When, pray tell, is pay fair? These questions dance around a coming trial in Delaware’s Chancery Court...
The National Business Aviation Association , or NBAA, show started in Las Vegas on Tuesday. It’s like a car show, but with jets—a hot topic these days. Private jet use is in the spotlight after an activist criticized Emerson Electric ’s (ticker: EMR) private jet “fleet” when arguing for lower costs. Many companies use private jets—including PG&E (PCG) and Facebook (FB)—but they don’t tend to advertise it...
AT&T ’s board got an unwelcome surprise this past Monday, when a well-known activist investor decided to question the company’s long-honed—and expensive—strategy. For investors, though, Elliott Management’s new focus on AT&T is likely to have positive long-term benefits...
Cloudera this morning said it reached a standstill agreement with investor Carl Icahn, granting the corporate raider two board seats. Icahn affiliates hold a total of about 18.4% of Cloudera’s common stock, about 50.3 million shares, a stake worth a little over $300 million...
FedEx was moving on Tuesday, rising 2.5%, better than the market’s gain, as investors attempted to triangulate what’s next for activist investor Bill Ackman and his fund, Pershing Square. Pershing announced on Monday it had sold its $700-plus million position in United Technologies (ticker: UTX) stock.
Carl Icahn is seeing red. In a letter Monday blasting Occidental Petroleum ’s management and board, Icahn, the billionaire activist investor and Occidental shareholder, asserted that Warren Buffett took Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub “to the cleaners” when Occidental (ticker: OXY) agreed to issue $10 billion of preferred stock to Berkshire Hathaway (BRK.A) in late April. That preferred carries an 8% dividend yield, and Berkshire also got valuable warrants on Occidental stock...
Investors haven’t seemed happy about United Technologies’ blockbuster deal to merge its aerospace division with defense contractor Raytheon. But United Tech’s latest quarterly results show shareholders have no reason to worry, according to the industrial conglomerate’s CFO. CFO Akhil Johri is excited by the potential Raytheon merger benefits and believes the market may be missing several key benefits. To start, he highlighted United Tech’s strong record for past deals...
At age 53, the activist investor Bill Ackman is having the best year of his career . And for those who want to invest alongside him, there is now an opportunity to get in at a big discount. Ackman’s closed-end fund, Pershing Square Holdings (ticker PSH. Netherlands), closed Tuesday at $17.90 a share, a 28% discount to its net asset value of $24.92 on June 30...
New voting rules from a popular investment adviser mean that some well-known asset managers—including Pimco—are opposing company management at annual shareholder meetings. Typically, proxy season is a springtime ritual during which dissident shareholders voice their frustrations with corporate management, institutional investors side with the CEO, and little is accomplished.
Carl Icahn’s latest target is Occidental Petroleum . He has blasted the company for its “hugely overpriced acquisition of Anadarko Petroleum ” and for disenfranchising shareholders by refusing to allow them to vote on the deal . While there is little the activist investor can do to stop the $38 billion acquisition, he is adding to the growing shareholder pressure on Occidental (ticker: OXY)—and that could be bullish for its depressed stock...
Vanguard Group’s tough stance on directors serving on too many boards—sometimes called “overboarding”—has started to bite, says Don Bilson, head of event-driven research at Gordon Haskett...
Nelson Peltz’s Trian Fund Management has sold Procter & Gamble (ticker: PG) for the first time since Peltz joined the company’s board after a contentious election two years ago...