We have talked a couple of times around here about a financial novelty item called
the Shareholder Vote Exchange, which was in theory a way for
people to buy and sell the votes associated
with their shares of publicly traded stock. If you own 1,000
shares of Walt Disney Co., you probably don’t really care about
voting those shares for shareholder proposals or even contested
director elections, but at Disney somebody does in fact care
about getting a lot of votes. Supposedly they would pay 20 cents per vote, though I have my
doubts.
The Shareholder
Vote Exchange has a website, and got some media attention, because
it is a fun idea. You could imagine it being a real idea:
You could imagine a large active market for stock votes, separate
from but related to the market for actual stock, just as there
currently exists a large market for stock lending. I suppose there
might be legal or other obstacles to that market really becoming
big or important. But there are no such obstacled to imagining it. In a
frictionless world, maybe this would be a cool thing that existed.
But in the real world SVE’s market for Disney votes — votes in a
close, expensive, high-profile proxy fight in a company with a lot
of retail ownership, which should be the best possible case for
buying votes — seems to have been quite small and hypothetical.
And on Sunday SVE emailed customers to say that it was winding
down operations. “There's clearly a market opportunity here, but
we weren't in a strong position to achieve its full potential,”
its CEO told me. Ah well.
