![](NYT%20DealBook%202021%20header%20x20.png)
DEALBOOK NEWSLETTER
By Andrew
Ross Sorkin, Jason
Karaian, Sarah
Kessler, Stephen
Gandel, Lauren
Hirsch and Ephrat
Livni
Dec. 15, 2021
![](NYT%20DealBook%20202112115%20image%20x05.png)
Exclusive: Crowdsourcing shareholder activism
Today, a service
is launching that will allow individuals to use their brokerage accounts to
shake up public companies, just like hedge funds and other big activist
investors do. Iconik, a new app, offers commission-free trading, like Robinhood
and others, while also encouraging users to team up and force companies to make
changes by collectively voting their shares.
Institutional
investors have long held the most sway on matters like
executive pay, director nominations and environmental practices because of the
size of their holdings. Using Iconik, small shareholders could create their own
campaigns and get users to pledge their votes, which would be cast collectively
at a company’s shareholder meeting, potentially giving a group the same clout as
a large institution. It’s crowdsourcing, but for shareholder activism.
Alex Thaler,
Iconik’s C.E.O., got the idea during the meme stock rally. “Most
investors don’t put much value in their voting rights, or even know they exist,”
he told DealBook. The meme stock rally, he said, showed that with social media
tools, collective action in the stock market is much easier today.
The app is
launching with two active campaigns. One is sponsored
by the group Sleeping Giants, which is calling shareholders to force Facebook to
shut down hate speech on its platform, and the second is aimed at JPMorgan
Chase, which environmental activists want to stop lending to fossil-fuel
companies.
There is a
potential downside: Iconik encourages investors to buy
individual stocks, while financial advisers generally recommend diversified
index funds. But Frank Partnoy, a Berkeley Law professor who studies shareholder
governance and is an investor in Iconik, said that individual investors have
given up their voice in corporate America in the name of diversification. “What
GameStop and AMC showed us is that when individual investors decide to act
together they can have a significant influence on the market,” he told DealBook.
© 2021 The
New York Times Company