FINRA Foundation turns down voter funding proposal

Yesterday I received this response from the FINRA Foundation to the Voter Funded Investor Education proposal I sent them last October:

Thank you for submitting your proposal. I apologize for not responding more quickly. At this time, we think our grant making process works very well. In addition, your proposal would be difficult to implement under the Global Research Analyst Settlement. I appreciate your thoughtfulness in preparing this proposal.

I will continue to look for ways of funding a pilot program to test how effective voter allocation can be, not only for investor education, but also to help us retail investors vote our proxies. Now that a consensus is building in support of Client Directed Voting, a little funding could go a long way toward supporting proxy voting advice and systems for sharing it freely.

New York Times and Harvard blog on empowering retail investors

Two good articles published today —

New York Times: Voting Your Shares May Start to Matter

Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance and Financial Regulation: Fixing the Problems with Client Directed Voting

Related post on this blog: Investor Education on Proxy Voting

History of these ideas: “Proxy Voting Brand Competition” (2007) and “The Internet Will Drive Corporate Monitoring” (2000) at votermedia.org/publications

SECIAC Feb 22 Meeting Video

The webcast archive video of the SEC Investor Advisory Committee‘s Feb 22 meeting has now been posted at www.connectlive.com/events/secadvisory022210/. This time they have helpfully broken the daylong meeting into smaller chunks. Starting at time 13:50 of “II. Investor As Owner Subcommittee Recommendations”, I presented the Proxy Voting Transparency proposal, which passed unanimously. I’m excited about how this will empower individual investors — see the future steps outlined in this earlier post.