Chapter 11

Breathing Down Your Neck

How to Handle Activist Investors and Hedge Funds Intruding on Your Turf

In This Chapter

  • Why shareholder activism?
  • How do activists operate?
  • The economic consequences of shareholder activism.
  • Sovereign wealth funds: the new activists?
  • What to do when activists come calling.

We have come a long way since the 1932 annual shareholder meeting of the New York City Consolidated Gas Company, where the “chairman read through the company’s annual report and then, without recognizing stockholders who raised their hands to ask questions from the floor, adjourned the meeting and invited everyone present to proceed to another room for lunch.”1 Who said there is no free lunch? In 2011, the J.C. Penney Company announced ...

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