I’m just a humble labour & corpgov wonk, so most of the time the kinds of things that interest me are buried in the business pages. But it feels like, as with the financial crisis, questions about who controls businesses and how, and in whose inter…Read more…
In defence of the Behavioural Insights Team
I’ve seen something a bit odd on twitter over the past few days – people from various bits of the Left having a dig at the involvement of the Behavioural Insights Team (BIT) in the government’s response to the Coronavirus outbreak. I’ve no dog in …Read more…
Fluttery votes
Here’s the list of Paddy Power Betfair (now Flutter) major shareholders disclosed in last year’s annual report. Capital Group is reported as having 5.9%, or 4.6m shares at 5 March 2019. Of these almost 3.9% are accounted for by the EuroPacific fund.
Against transparency!
The more time I spend looking at disclosures from investors, the less sense a lot of it makes to me. I’ve blogged quite a bit about meaningless Stewardship Code reporting, with dozens of hedge / boutique funds using exactly the same blurb. We are about…Read more…
NMC voting turnout
Right… here’s what we can see in the NMC meeting results. The first graph just sets out what NMC reports. So there is a headline total voting turnout for all meeting and at AGMs from 2015 I can also split out the insider and minority shareholder turn…Read more…
How seriously do hedge funds voting disclosure?
Not seriously, I would argue. The principle that investors should disclose their voting records is pretty well established now, but we still get this cut & paste stuff justify not doing so.
More NMC stuff
A quick look at disclosures for one of NMC’s largest shareholders, Wellington. Last Friday there was an RNS that announced that it held a bit over 10m shares, but in a note said it didn’t have voting discretion for 1.35m of them (13.5%).
Then on Mond…Read more…
NMC Health voting rights
I spent a bit of Sunday trawling through NMC annual reports and RNS announcements. If you look at the disclosed shareholders in the annual reports you can figure out the holdings of the controlling shareholders. If you then look at the AGM results you …Read more…
Star Trek: The Paper Clip Maximiser
One of the books I really enjoyed recently was The AI Does Not Hate You by Tom Chivers. It’s sorta more about the people who think about AI, and how they think about it, and it was basically right up my street.
There’s a bit early on where he describe…Read more…
TR1 tales at NMC
A few more funky bits and pieces in the entrails of NMC Health’s filings…
A couple of banks facilitating stuff for clients presumably. In the Morgan Stanley case it’s an equity swap. Quite interested in who would want an NMC equity swap at this poin…Read more…
FTSE100 corporate governance failure
UPDATED: Very useful info from Chris Hodge added – the ownership disclosure requirements are weaker for non-UK issuers.
It’s not surprising, given the market turmoil, that the crisis at NMC Health has attracted less attention than it would norma…Read more…
Another Flutter
I’m finding this mildly mesmerising. just Capital’s long position (based on TR1 disclosures) versus the total *public* short in Flutter (based on the FCA register).
A little Flutter
Just a chart. Short positions plus TR1 announced positions in Flutter Entertainment from start of October to Friday. The two trend lines are for the short position (lower line) and Capital Group’s position (upper line). Bear in mind there are only a fe…Read more…
Globalisation and small c conservatism
“He… told us we had to go straight to the Celtic Manor in Newport – 50 miles away – by five o’clock to sign the documents and British Coal executives would be flying down to meet us by helicopter. Even I could not believe this. They had won but they wa…Read more…
Rump placings
A very quick one. I’ve updated the graph a did a year or so back on the amount of stock shifted via rump placings (essentially the leftovers that aren’t taken up in a rights issue). I got into this one because of Kier Group, which had a rights issue to…Read more…
Post-democratic pensions
“[T]raditional politics in seen less and less as something that belongs to the citizens or to the society, and more and more as something done by politicians. There is a world of citizens – or a host of particular worlds of them – and a world of politi…Read more…
Red Tories
One of the most interesting things I read over the holidays was Little Platoons by David Skelton. If you don’t know him, he’s a Conservative policy wonk who has spent several years looking at ways to broaden his party’s appeal beyond its traditional el…Read more…
Workers on boards – sharp edges
Just a quickie on one of my favour topics – worker representation in corporate governance. First up a bit of politics: Once again the main opposition parties (including the SNP) went into the election advocating an extension of worker representation on…Read more…
Turnout tales
If recent events tell us anything, it’s that voting matters… With that in mind this is a quick post on something that caught my eye this year: sharp changes in voting turnout at a number of companies. Some of the more striking examples have been at c…Read more…
The dog that didn’t bark
To be honest, I’m not looking forward to election day tomorrow. If the polling is right we can expect a Conservative majority and Brexit to go ahead, neither of which are my favoured outcomes! I thought the same would happen in 2017 and it didn’t, so w…Read more…