Institutional investors are howling for US public companies to focus more on the long-term.^[1]  This is unsurprising. Long-term focused companies produce significantly better results over time, reporting far greater revenue growth with less volatility, far higher levels of economic profit, and greater total return to shareholders.^[2] So if you are holding stock for a long time, a long-term focus for your portfolio companies is critical.
Continue Reading Finding Friends is Hard: Long-Term Investors’ Relationship with Proxy Advisors, Activists and Long-Term Private Equity Funds

“If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.”  Ernest Rutherford

Sometimes you need to get into the fundamentals to understand if your belief system is sound.  In corporate governance literature of the last two decades, there is no more fundamental concept than Tobin’s Q, which legions of law professors have used as a proxy for firm value.  Based on regression analyses examining variations in Tobin’s Q, they have made definitive pronouncements about any number of corporate governance topics, from staggered boards to the value of activism.  Yet tracing the evolution of Tobin’s Q to its current state—a state completely alien to the original conception—reveals a twisted tale, proceeding like an epidemiological disaster in which Tobin’s Q transforms from an innocent and useful organism in macroeconomics to an unrecognizably mutated and widespread disease in corporate governance literature, infecting policies and practices throughout the corporate governance world.
Continue Reading Mutant Q – The Superbug Infecting Foundational Studies on Entrenchment, Staggered Boards, and Activism

Beyond the cacophonous din of voices calling for companies to serve a “social purpose,” adopt a variety of governance proposals, achieve quarterly performance targets, and listen to (and indeed even “think like”) activists, there is now, most promisingly, a call from genuine long term shareholders for public companies to articulate and pursue a long term strategy.^[1]  This latest shareholder demand directly supports the achievement of traditional corporate purposes, and seems, more than any other shareholder demand of the last decade, the most likely to increase shareholder value.  Yet in current circumstances, where all corporate defenses have been stripped in the name of “good governance,” boards and management have been given zero space in which to formulate and implement a long term strategy.  Indeed, the very fact that shareholders must demand corporations focus on long term strategy demonstrates just how effectively the governance movement has been co-opted by market forces to serve the interests of short term activists and traders to the detriment of long term investors.  It is time for long term investors to recognize that aspects of the good governance movement have in fact come at significant cost to their own investors, to be perhaps a bit more wary of partnerships with activists, and to actively create the conditions that will allow boards and management to focus on the long term.  Exhortations are not enough. The first step should be to bring back staggered boards.
Continue Reading Long-Term Investors Have a Duty to Bring Back the Staggered Board (and Proxy Advisors Should Get on Board)