Trends in Activist Investing: What You Need to Know

Few Investor Relations (IR) professionals will evade contact with activist investors in coming years as their influence grows. During the next four weeks, Q4 will examine what’s new with activist investors and what these changes mean for 2016 and beyond. We’ll start by answering some basic questions: who are activist investors? What do they want? And how do they go about getting it?

We’re in the golden age of investor activism – and it’s called that for a reason. In 2014 alone, the number of activist investors identified in regulatory filings jumped more than 40 percent from 2013. The rise in popularity comes as activists like Carl Icahn, William Ackman’s Pershing Square Capital Management, Jana Partners, and other hedge funds beat the overall market and find new ways to force change at companies where they see untapped value. In aggregate, activists now control more than $200 billion in assets, up from about $12 billion in 2003, meaning no company is too small, or too large, to escape the activist gaze. Activists have targeted companies with less than $10 million in market capitalization as well as large ones like Apple and Yahoo.

Hier geht es zum vollständigen Artikel, geschrieben von Carol Wolf, erschienen auf www.q4blog.com.