How to Be An Active Shareholder

How to be an Active Shareholder

Video Transcript:

Hey. This is Anne from Magnifi, and today, I thought I'd talk about what it means to be a shareholder. So, last week, I was checking out the word transformation, and I found this interesting ETF that actually uses shareholder activism as a way to affect change within a company. And what shareholder activism means is that as the owner of a share of a company, you're actually a partial owner of the company, and you're entitled to do things like participate in the annual meeting and vote on matters like the governance of the company and some operational things involved with that company. You might have noticed in your inbox if you are a share owner, that you get emails about the annual meeting, and I thought I might take you through that process.

In this example, I received an email from Amazon last week telling me that their shareholder meeting is happening May 24th, and that I can vote in it. You could actually go in person if you wanted, or you can do what's called proxy voting. And that just means that you're voting online. So, I enter my pin, and this will take me to the proxy voting website. And from here, I can learn more information before I vote. So, I can do things like read the annual report, see what happened in the company last year, how the company performed, what changes they made, or I can actually click here to attend the meeting virtually on the day of the meeting. And if I scroll down, I'll actually see the ability to vote on different measures put forward by Amazon. A big one would be election of the board of directors, the people who govern Amazon. You might recognize Jeff Bezos' name. And for each of these individuals, I can vote for or against them or abstain from voting, deciding if they're going to be a member of the board of directors of Amazon.

And if I scroll down, I'll see things like shareholder proposal requesting report on packaging materials. If you are a user of Amazon or shareholder of Amazon, something like the packing materials they use might be important to you. So, you might want to vote for this or against this depending on how you feel about it. This is just one example of how as the owner of a share of a company, you can participate in the elections in the company, and you can vote on matters that relate to the operations of the company as well.