4 ms·
Owning a few percent of a Fortune 500 company will probably get you a board seat, and a 10% stake probably makes you the single largest holder (especially ignor
by czinck 10y ago
Owning a few percent of a Fortune 500 company will probably get you a board seat, and a 10% stake probably makes you the single largest holder (especially ignoring companies still held by the founders/family like Wal-Mart or Google). Vanguard's current holdings makes them the single largest owner of Apple, Microsoft, and Exxon (the 3 largest companies in the S&P 500, I didn't check further). And that's just one of the firms offering index tracking ETFs.
Vanguard owning 6% of the entire US stock market value is huge. You could reasonably re-title this "Is Vanguard Eating the World" and be right if it wasn't for Blackrock and other ETF firms being close behind them.
Sources: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/holders?p=AAPL https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/AAPL/holders?p=AAPL and similar pages.
- tanderson92 10y agoBut "Vanguard" is simply the sum total of all fund investors, since it has an inverted corporate structure.
- czinck 10y agoTrue, I got a little carried away with "Vanguard eating the world". I was just trying to get across the scale of 6% of the entire US stock market.
- tcoppi 10y agoIn terms of using equity to exercise voting rights, you complete give up those rights when you buy into an index fund. So to a large extent, the voting policies of Vanguard and other index fund managers can matter a lot, especially if they are easily persuaded by activist investors.
- qaq 10y agoThat inverted structure is BS you can only vote for people proposed by the management company for funds and in turn those people will vote for management company appointments. Whoever started this whole thing is still controlling it you just have an illusion of control. "Own nothing, but control everything."