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Podcast Alert: Annual Meeting Season 2026 — Expert Advice from Carl & Peder Hagberg
Carl and Peder Hagberg of The Shareholder Service OPTIMIZER join Meredith Ervine from TheCorporateCounsel.net to discuss proxy season risks, virtual meetings, and shareholder engagement for 2026.
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Recent Articles
Retail Investors Take the Mic: Engaging the Modern Shareholder
Retail Influence on the Rise The 2025 proxy season highlighted a paradox the OPTIMIZER has long noted: retail shareholders are more important than ever, yet remain seriously under-engaged when it comes to actually voting their proxies. At many large-cap companies, retail investors controlled nearly 40% of shares, but only 28% of those shares were voted—a nine-year low. And this number, please...
2025 Was The 90th Anniversary Of The Proxy Solicitation Business: A Quick Look At The “Highlights And Lowlights” And A Closer Look At Where It Stands Today
It’s been 90 years since the Nye family turned its brokerage business, Georgeson & Co., into a “proxy-chasing business” in 1935 – a time when individual investments in stocks had become very big business and voted proxies were very much in demand at Shareholder Meetings since this was long before Mutual Funds and other big investment funds ended up owning the vast majority of the shares...
2025 MARKS THE 25TH ANNIVERSARY OF “NOTICE AND ACCESS” – THE BEST “PUSH-MODEL” EVER!
BILLIONS OF DOLLARS SAVED. BUT NOW, IT DESPERATELY NEEDS A FIX: A “PULL-MODEL” THAT WORKS – AND A RADICAL RE-ORDERING OF REQUIRED INFO Issuers of securities should be sounding big cheers for 25 years of Notice and Access – which has saved tens of billions of dollars in printing, enclosing and pushing paper proxy packages to investors, many of whom mostly threw them in the trash. We well recall...
Turmoil In Proxy Land: Why It’s More Important Than Ever To Have Truly Expert Outside Counsel On Your Team
In our 30+ years of deep involvement in shareholder meetings, proxy voting, proxy contests, shareholder activism, and corporate governance in general, we have NEVER seen an environment as volatile or as consequential as the one corporate issuers will face in 2026. Consider just a few of the converging forces: A major deregulatory shift at the SEC — including no No-Action letters for the 2026 AGM...
Turmoil In The Corporate Counsel Community
The Bloomberg Rankings Reveal Some Major Surprises – And Lots Of Surprisingly Missing Names On The Law Firm Side Of Proxy Fights… where, it should be noted, the lawyers are often instrumental in choosing the proxy solicitor… and some old-guard leaders are currently on a lot of “no fly lists” for caving without a fight to Trump demands for cash and pro-bono work as ‘reparations.’ The top-three...
Turmoil – And A Scary Amount Of Cluelessness – At The Sec
Senior members of the SEC seem to be hell-bent on a mission to totally demolish the regulatory framework that has been evolving since the Great Depression: As we noted in our last issue, Chairman Paul Atkins is laboring under the incredibly ill-informed idea that the failure of the number of publicly-traded companies to grow is due to too much regulation. What sensible entrepreneur, we ask...
SEC Chair Drops Three Bombshells: Questions Precatory Proposals and Defers to State Laws Like Texas’s $1M Threshold — The End of Proxy Regulation as We Know It?
In his Keynote Address at the John L. Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance’s 25th Anniversary Gala on Oct. 9, 2025. SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins started off on a high note: “I am delighted to discuss one of my top priorities as Chairman, which is to make being a public company an attractive proposition for more firms… There are approximately 4,700 exchange-listed companies today, compared to...
Just In Time For Folks Who Think That Shareholder Votes Have No Value… “Mercury Vote” Also Begs To Differ
Thanks much to our colleagues and friends Pat Tracey and Andy Wilcox, who alerted us to the Mercury Vote website, advising that: "We are an auction marketplace that empowers shareholders to generate extra revenue by selling their unused proxy voting rights,enabling investors to obtain these aggregated proxy votes to reduce costs.” There’s not much info on the website yet, other than the callout...
Exxon Mobil Launches Program Allowing Retail Shareholders To Issue “Standing Voting Instructions.” A Potential Game-Changer… Or A Major Flop Ahead?
It seems that every law firm in the country has been summarizing Exxon Mobil’s attempted vote-getting effort, speculating that others will follow suit and offering pointers on what to watch for and what to do. We, however, as 60+ year observers of actual U.S. proxy voting behaviors, are expecting this to become an expensive and totally embarrassing flop… unless a robust Investor Education...
Ellen Philip and Associates Turn Their Widely Attended Holiday Party Into “A Party with A Purpose”
We were deeply saddened to learn that Cal Donly - the life-and-business partner of Ellen Philip, who survives him - passed away on October 18th. Everyone who was anyone in the Shareholder Servicing world over the past 60 years knows Cal and Ellen - two of the finest, most reliable and most generous people we’ve ever met. Both of them were 60+ year members of the Corporate Transfer Agents...
Start Preparing For Your 2026 AGM Now!
Yes, we know it’s mid-summer, but now really is the time to start thinking about your 2025 Annual Meeting, while you have a bit of idle time to reflect on what worked well – and not so well in 2025 – both at your company and at other companies like your own – and to prepare early for 2026. For starters, take a look at our reports on VSMs – on the best – and on those that had glitches, glaring...
Institutional Investors Promise To Monitor And Act On VSMs That Short-Circuit Investor Participation
As the big Spring Shareholder Meeting Season begins we want to renew our warnings that “Big Brother is watching” – and rightly so, we say - to be sure that all shareholders are given a fair chance - not just to listen passively, but to be HEARD at VSMs – AND that they are given sufficient time to CAST THEIR VOTES after the “discussion period” is over. Please be sure to visit our website,...
Awful Advice On VSMs From A Big T-A: Take It At Your Peril
In the run-up to the annual podcast covering “The Conduct of the Annual Meeting,” a prospective attendee wrote in to ask if they could pre-record their entire Meeting, and to answer only pre-recorded questions, saying that their transfer agent (one of the biggest ones, that we will allow to remain anonymous) recommended this to them as part of a “major trend.” Ouch! We responded that Meetings...
A Quick Review Of The Apple VSM (We Were Pretty Happy Until We Realized We’d Been Snookered)
In keeping with our plans to tune in and review more VSMs this year we were happy to attend Apple’s nice (and early, for West-Coasters) Feb. 25th Meeting, held at 8:00 a.m. Pacific time; 11:00 Eastern. Apple is one of our top-two investments – with an amazing 54,526.7% return, and we LOVE them – but with a sorta’ bad record for shareholder meetings, having mis-reported the voting results TWICE...
Take Ownership of Your Governance: Don’t Wait for Activists to Start the Conversation
Navigating M&A and Shareholder Activism: Key Insights for 2025 Co-Editor Peder Hagberg interviews Bob Marese, President of MacKenzie Partners, on current trends in mergers and acquisitions, shareholder engagement, activism, and effective board governance heading into the 2025 Proxy Season. Q: Bob, can you provide an overview of what’s happening at MacKenzie Partners and how recent changes in...
Leveling the Playing Field of Corporate and Shareholder Transparency
A Call to Action from Joseph Caruso, CEO, Alliance Advisors Joe Caruso: Over the past few years, there’s been a growing call for greater corporate transparency, especially from government agencies, institutional investors, and proxy advisory firms. But are we really creating a level playing field when it comes to shareholder transparency? OPTIMIZER: It seems that we’re still far from that....
Shareholder Services: History
Podcast Alert: Annual Meeting Season 2026 — Expert Advice from Carl & Peder Hagberg
Carl and Peder Hagberg of The Shareholder Service OPTIMIZER join Meredith Ervine from TheCorporateCounsel.net to discuss proxy season risks, virtual meetings, and shareholder engagement for 2026.
Listen to hear their insights on this year’s annual meeting season.
Carl Hagberg
The Shareholder Service OPTIMIZER, first published in 1994, is “dedicated to helping public companies – and their suppliers – to deliver better and more cost-effective services to shareholders”.
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