ONEFUND, a private, independent FinTech company, today announced that it has added Index Proxy Polling as a shareholder feature for its S&P 500® Equal Weight index fund, ticker symbol INDEX. Index Proxy Polling enables shareholders to weigh in on important resolutions from 500 of America’s largest corporations. From Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) matters to Big Tech censorship, index investors can now be part of the proxy process.
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Index Proxy Polling was created to potentially give investors a voice and to provide an independent alternative to the growing concentration of power on Wall Street, where just 5 companies hold 90% of all index fund assets. As investors are learning, index funds strip investors of their right to vote on all proxy matters, giving that power to the fund managers. Index Proxy Polling is historic because it attempts to shift some of this power back to the shareholder.
ONEFUND seeks to democratize the industry by opening up the proxy process to index fund investors. Index Proxy Polling is a 3-step process.
1) Shareholders are polled on proxy resolutions submitted by the S&P 500® companies.
2) The shareholder results are then tallied.
3) The Investment Adviser of INDEX factors these shareholder results, among other factors, before casting the final vote.
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“Who better knows the best interests of the shareholder than the shareholder themselves? Their input is vital. We think this is a transformative first step that the industry will eventually follow.” said Mike Willis, Founder of ONEFUND
Further, there seems to be a disconnect between shareholder views and institutional voting records. For example, Morningstar’s 2019 Proxy Voting Study2 found that BlackRock supported only 5 out of 72 proxy ballot questions addressing social and environmental concerns from companies in the S&P 500®. Additionally, a Bloomberg article3 recently stated that in the twelve months ending August 2020, BlackRock and Vanguard “were among the least supportive” of certain environmental issues, and “while 15 out of 102 such shareholder votes passed, more than double could have done so with support from one or more of the largest three managers.” This is due to the fact that 22% of the shares of the typical S&P 500® company already sit in the portfolios of the “Big Three”, according to another Bloomberg Report4.
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