Introducing:
Most Significant Votes
A new home for essential shareholder voting insights
We're thrilled to announce that Paul Lee's Most Significant Votes blog has found its new home at Impactive Tech. This influential series has reached thousands of subscribers over the years with essential insights into shareholder voting patterns and corporate governance.
About Paul Lee
What is Most Significant Votes?
Most Significant Votes highlights the key AGM decisions that matter to asset owners and on which they might wish to hold their fund managers accountable. By tracking shareholder dissent at the world's largest companies, we provide unique insight into how mainstream investors are actually voting – insight that isn't readily available elsewhere.
What makes this analysis unique is its rigorous methodology: we adjust for free float and voting rights distortions to isolate the votes of investors who are voting freely, filtering out block shareholders with board representation and dual-class share structures. This means we're showing you what independent institutional investors are really thinking, not just the headline voting figures that can be skewed by insiders and controlling shareholders.
For asset owners, it's a vital tool for understanding how investment managers are exercising their stewardship responsibilities on behalf of their clients. For asset managers, it offers essential context on voting patterns and peer behaviour, helping them understand the signals that matter most to their clients and the broader market.
What to expect
Starting next week, we'll be covering the Southern Hemisphere voting season, along with the handful of Northern Hemisphere meetings that occur at the same time – and we already know there'll be some fascinating ones over the coming month and a half. As usual for the series this season, we'll run fortnightly through to early December.
Understanding the data: Rules and limitations
We believe in transparency, so here's how we capture and report on significant votes – along with the limitations of our approach:
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Disclosure: We're dependent on company disclosures for the data we capture. Many markets, particularly emerging markets, don't report detailed vote data at all. While some companies disclose voluntarily, coverage is patchy, so ours is too.
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Timing: We rely on disclosure timing. Some markets (Canada, Australia, UK) report voting results same-day. Others, notably the US, take several days. That's why each blog covers a spread of AGM dates – they're included as they become available.
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Materiality: This is Most Significant Votes, so we tend to focus on votes at the world’s largest companies. There may be big votes at relatively small companies that don’t get captured, though we flex the exact size threshold for each market to give a better geographical spread.
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Issues covered: We capture votes that require real investor judgement: shareholder resolutions, say-on-climate votes, director appointments, remuneration, related party transactions, and audit issues. Public campaigns get extra attention. We typically don't focus on mechanical votes like capital structure.
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Scale of vote: The biggest driver for inclusion is the scale of shareholder dissent – votes against management resolutions or for shareholder resolutions. We use relative thresholds that consider what's typical for each resolution type.
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Balance: We limit votes captured per meeting, selecting representative samples when there are multiple large dissenting votes on similar resolutions. Our aim is accountability, and representative samples serve this best.
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Abstentions count: Our dissent figures include abstentions – they're contrary to board recommendations, so we count them.
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Broker non-votes don't: US brokers can vote client shares without instructions on certain resolutions (notably auditor reappointments). We exclude these since they weren't actually cast by investors.
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Adjustments for free float: We aim to isolate votes from investors voting freely, excluding only block shareholders with board representation who consistently vote with management. We use our best judgement and err on the side of conservatism.
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Adjustments for voting rights: We try to address distortions from dual-class structures and "loyalty" shares to better understand mainstream public market investor sentiment.
The meetings and votes we report represent a carefully selected subset of wider data we capture to identify the Most Significant Votes.
See you next week for the latest edition!