[kibibyte]

This is a bit tangential to the topic, but shareholder voting is interesting enough anyway.

* Musk will vote, for obvious reasons.

* Big institutional funds almost always vote with the board of directors recommendations. They very rarely rock the boat for a lot of mostly good reasons.

* Private shareholders with a sizable stake likely will vote.

* Retail shareholders (i.e. you and I) are notorious for not voting. Case in point: AMC is mostly held by retail investors at this point and had to go through all sorts of shenanigans to be able to increase the maximum number of shares they could issue, because that typically requires a shareholder vote that simply wouldn't ever get enough total votes to pass.

[sokoloff]

Institutional holders tend to vote along the direction recommended by ISS or Glass-Lewis.

Those recommendations do generally follow Board recommendations on strategic topics, but frequently diverge from the board on matters of employee and executive pay (approving increases to share/option pools, etc.)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutional_Shareholder_Se...

[kibibyte]

Ah, you're right! I'm now remembering that Vanguard mentions something like this for their default voting methodology, among the few choices they now allow investors to choose from.

[spacebanana7]

I wish there was an easy way to vote from RobinHood, Vanguard etc

[pquki4]

I receive emails from Schwab and it seems very straightforward -- there is a personalized link sent to your email, you click it and start to vote. It shows how many shares your have, what the questions are along with the board's recommendations are. No login. Probably not the most secure process but very easy and smooth

[kibibyte]

Robinhood is a brokerage, and should be passing proxy ballots through to you for companies you hold shares in.

It's arguable whether Vanguard should allow this, and whether it'd matter at the end. Vanguard is for retail investors who want to invest their money as cheaply as possible without thinking hard about it. Delivering proxy ballots, even electronically, does have a cost, and would likely make such funds slightly but noticeably more expensive. And to what benefit? After all, most retail investors don't care to vote. If you strongly care about your shareholder voice, the better solution is to buy shares in the company directly.

That said, Vanguard now lets you select from some broader voting methodologies (e.g. Vanguard's default, ESG, or "good corporate governance"). But nothing specific like "good corporate governance, except screw Musk over/always favor Musk".

[sokoloff]

Vanguard supports accounts that holds mutual funds (most of their focus/business) but also has accounts that can hold individual stocks.

In the individual stock case, Vanguard absolutely has to allow those share owners to vote their shares.

In the mutual fund case, Vanguard is the investor in the shares and Vanguard is the one who should cast the vote for those shares. End investors are invested in the mutual fund, and so could vote on mutual fund proxies, but IMO, should not be permitted to vote on the underlying shares that the mutual fund is invested in.

[kibibyte]

I completely forgot that Vanguard also runs a brokerage operation in addition to their funds.

[quickthrowman]

Vanguard lets you vote if you own individual shares. Vanguard owns the underlying shares for my units of VTI, so they get the votes. I absolutely do not want to vote on every individual stock in VTI.

[Larrikin]

I get notifications from Robin Hood whenever there is a vote and there is an entire section in the app devoted to letting you vote.

[dumbo-octopus]

I get emails all the time from Fidelity linking me to vote for some random policy. (I tend to ignore them)

[dmurray]

Does Musk vote? I thought this had to be approved by a majority of disinterested shareholders.

[eru]

Yes, it's a vote amongst 'disinterested' shareholders. The Edgar filing also says so.

See https://www.sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edgar/data/0001318605/0...

[TheCleric]

To be fair, Musk sometimes comes off as disinterested in the company.