The Blog

The long-time AGM dream

The long-time AGM dream: Here is some background to the journey that I and The Engagement Appeal – TEA are taking ✨

Think me crazy, but those who have known me for some time or worked with me will know about my ‘dream’ of owning shares in every single listed company and attending AGMs every day. I speak about this ‘dream’ very regularly, including in this video from February 2023 when I participated in a talk at The Conduit organised by Tulipshare with Jenna Armitage, Farah Cohen, and an incredible woman who has become one of my and TEA’s academic inspirations and intellectual backbone of our AGM engagement work, Professor Janette Rutterford.

In typical Janette-style, the good Professor educates me and the audience on the fact that I am following in a long line of ‘slightly odd’ women who did exactly what I am contemplating – they bought at least one share in many listed companies and attended the AGMs! Janette mentions two Americans, Wilma Soss and Elena Davis, who TEA has written about in our in our hashtag#2024IWD celebrations, as well as an icredible Brit, about whom the FT wrote ‘eulogising articles’.

Still very early days for the AGM ‘Odyssey’, but already, I am proud of what has been achieved to date:

📈Share positions acquired across 700 UK-listed companies, c. 490 of which are through interactive investor (ii) and the rest through Trading 212.

⚡️I have now tried and tested ii’s proxy voting system (offered by Broadridge) and I can say that it has indeed worked for our immediate needs and supports shareholder democracy by facilitating nominee beneficial holder voting participation like never before. The stacks of physical paper is not ideal 🌎but compared to how things was before, the system is not bad.

💌 AGM attendance request process via letters of represntation (LOR) also proven to be effective. Since trialling ii’s proxy voting app religiously from end of March, I! have received LORs in relation to (138) companies!

🤯Given that the AGMs are mostly all scheduled to take place at the same time – between 9am and 12pm, and are largely still only in-person 😢, I am physically not able to attend most / many of the meetings, so 1) I am making sure to at least email all the companies for which I have received LORs to lodge my questions, and 2) I am now starting to get colleagues to help me attend the meetings. Companies, why not sign up to Investor Meet Company or Lumi Global?

Some very interesting AGMs so far, with many more to follow this week. Good engagement thus far and I look forward to this continuing. Follow me and the team on our journey on teaxall.org and FinGlitz.io.

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