Tuesday, January 05, 2010

Moxy Vote

Moxy Vote is a new website (got started in November) which aims to link individual investors and advocates in order to get more individual investors to participate in corporate democracy. Most small shareholders don't bother to vote in corporate elections because a lot of effort is needed to understand the issues and most resolutions pass overwhelming in the direction recommended by the board of management. There are, though, occasionally mergers and the like which get voted opposite to board recommendations.

The idea of Moxy Vote is to change this by enabling investors to align their investment accounts alongside advocates that have informed opinions on the proxy ballots. The retail investors will then have their shares automatically voted in parallel to the advocates' shares. The site will cater to investors who are concerned about social causes (such as animal rights, human rights, environmental concerns, etc) as well as those that are pro-shareholder and are concerned about such things are executive compensation, strategic business decisions, etc.  Moxy Vote will just be a neutral platform that retail investors can use to get involved in any way they see fit.

It still seems to be very early days for this site as some of the advocates have not posted opinions on any of the upcoming votes. It is an interesting idea though and I'll be interested to see if it succeeds.

1 comment:

Mark Schlegel said...

Hello, my name is Mark Schlegel and I am one of the co-founders of Moxy Vote. Thank you so much for the post on your site. We are looking forward to empowering shareholders to have a voice once again in the boardrooms of the companies they own.

As you mentioned we are new and our site has relatively few opinions on proxy issues at this time. The major proxy season (the first half of the year accounts for 85% of the annual meetings) is just starting to get underway and more opinions will be coming as the season heats up.

Thanks again and we appreciate investment forums like yours that help investors stay informed of important topics.

Regards,

Mark