The Activist Investor Blog
The Activist Investor Blog
Guide to Activist Investing Information Sources
You know the folks who got rich in the gold rush, right? The ones who sold pickaxes and wheelbarrows to prospectors.
We don’t know whether the purveyors of information for activist investors have gotten rich. Some certainly have done well, to the extent that MSCI will acquire GMI Ratings soon after selling off ISS. Either way, a number of them provide a range of interesting and useful data and documents for investors that want to research the activist prospects at a portfolio company.
In a new resource guide, we summarize what’s available, with links to each service. Here, we comment a bit on what we’ve seen.
The sources we have in mind allow you to research a specific company or companies. Activist investing demands a wide range of financial and other information. We identify these six areas:
❖financials
❖bylaws and Certificate of Incorporation
❖shareholder voting
❖shareholder listing
❖SEC filings
❖corp gov evaluation
although of course there are others.
We know of many other information sources, including a range of newsletters and alert services. We’ve commented previously on some of them, and now compiled a more extensive resource on the subject.
The ones that we highlight allow in-depth analysis of a specific company (or companies), for purposes of assessing the activist investing prospects there. Other information sources have more general commentary about the sector or about activist investors, rather than serving as a source of data and documents about individual companies
We left off the proxy advisors, ISS and Glass Lewis. While they of course analyze individual companies, they principally advise on how to vote, rather than serving as a source of data and documents on companies. Elsewhere we have described and defended them.
We see the resources lined up in three areas:
❖Corp gov data and document sources, which includes Activist Insight, SharkRepellent, and 13D Monitor
❖Financial data, with major sources such as Bloomberg and CapitalIQ
❖Speciality sources, for interpretations and analysis of data, such as GMI Ratings and Proxy Insight.
We’ve summarized a number of these in the resource guide. As always, we welcome comment, elaboration, corrections, and additional sources.
Tuesday, July 22, 2014