Data Channels: Shareholder Activism Defense

NEW! Be proactive against activists with SharkWatch and SharkRepellent, now synchronized
within Pinpoint Intelligence!

An increasingly important strategy for any Investor Relations (IR) department is keeping ahead of shareholder activism. In recent years, there has been a dramatic escalation in shareholder activism activity, marked by rising dissident success rates in proxy fights and in obtaining board of director seats with which to carry forward their agenda.

In today’s market, understanding the activist profile of each new shareholder is a requirement for the well-informed Investor Relations Officer. Activist history is germane to understanding an institutional investor as is their investment style and sector-focus.

The Activism Channel within Pinpoint Intelligence helps public companies get informed and stay informed about activist investors, dissident campaigns as well as peer and other public company defense strategies.

FactSet, through its SharkWatch and SharkRepellent databases, provides the activist and corporate defense information for synchronization within Pinpoint Intelligence. SharkWatch and SharkRepellent have been tracking activist and corporate defense campaigns since 2001. This service is a core research source used by most bankers and lawyers to understand activism. Now, for the first time, the corporate issuer can have direct access to this critical intelligence. Updates to Pinpoint Intelligence are made each night.

SharkWatch - Activist history provided on specific institutional investors

SharkWatch is a corporate activism database that provides tools to monitor and analyze activist investors and their campaigns. SharkWatch proprietary research efforts continually search through SEC filings and news sources for indications of activism.

SharkWatch, in conjunction with underlying SEC filings, enables subscribers to:

• Research activist investors and their holdings in your company, your peers or any other public company. Track movements taken in terms of new stakes, increases, and decreases as well as the percentage of shares held and the number of activist investors with holdings in a company.
  
  
• Gain insight into and understand an investor’s history of activism with data about the principals and fund managers guiding activist investor activities, including biographical information, typical tactics and 13D filings.
  
  
• Analyze trend data, research similar historical tactics and profile what was required for the dissidents to settle. Build and compare firm profiles detailing all activism against a specific company.
  
  
• Perform queries to identify precedents and current tactics being employed by activists. Search on terms such as campaign types, dissident tactics, activism types, meeting dates and proxy fight winners.
  
  

SharkRepellent - The takeover defense and corporate governance positioning of U.S. public companies

SharkRepellent’s corporate governance database provides takeover defense and corporate governance data for more than 4,500 U.S. incorporated public companies.

Subscribers can:

• Benchmark their activism defense strategies against their peers and other companies.
  
  
• Assess company charter and by-law features, along with defensive characteristics, for peers and specific companies.
  
  
• Perform comparable analyses across multiple variables, including industry, market index, market capitalization and state of incorporation.
  
  
• Find out how well defended a company is with SharkRepellent’s proprietary Bullet Proof Rating System, which quantifies relative defense protection and categorizes companies by strong or weak defenses.
  
  
• Quickly create and save custom reports by compiling information from a company’s articles of incorporation, bylaws, state takeover laws and shareholder rights plans, or access SharkRepellent’s expanding library of presentation-ready reports designed to help simplify complex research.
  
  
• Receive custom alerts to monitor adoptions and changes to poison pills as well as share repurchase programs for client portfolios.
  
  
• Automatically generate comprehensive company defense profiles and compare them across a group of selected peers.