Breelander wrote:Mine does (ii, TD Direct, as was). I didn't have to ask, I have already had email notification that the documents were available in my account, as was the ability to vote. FWIW I voted against.
Yes, ii / TD-as-was are very good on making it easy for shareholders to vote. It's probably worth saying though that it's a feature one can turn on and off, so it may well not be turned on for some (many?) of their clients. To turn it on if it's not turned on at present, one needs to click on "personal details & preferences" on the "account" menu, then on "Update your Preferences", then tick the "I would like to subscribe to the Voting & Information Service" box and click on "Save".
The result will be that you get an email from "INTERACTIVE INVESTOR" (all caps, unlike their usual all-lower-case "interactive investor" emails) each time an opportunity to vote on one of one's companies arises, most frequently in their AGMs. Be warned that most of the things one is asked to vote on (and there are quite a few of them per AGM) are pretty uninteresting formalities - e.g. the one I have for Barratt Developments' AGM at present has 20 resolutions:
1 to "receive" the annual report & accounts
1 to approve the directors' remuneration report (report, not policy - i.e. only backward-looking)
2 to approve dividends (final & special)
8 to elect or re-elect directors
2 to appoint auditors & authorise the audit committee to fix their remuneration
1 to authorise the company to make political donations (*)
1 to approve an employee share scheme
2 to authorise various ways of fundraising by issuing new shares, up to certain limits (**)
1 to authorise share buybacks, also up to certain limits (**)
1 to allow general meetings of the company to be called at 14 days notice (IIRC 21 would be needed without it)
One for BHP Billiton's AGM has just come in - that one has a roughly similar list of 19 resolutions. And I would expect something broadly similar for each share in my HYP. So even a much smaller HYP than mine will have hundreds of AGM resolutions per year that the HYPer could vote on. Unless one is very dedicated (and HYP strategies are in many ways really designed for those who don't want to be very dedicated!), one is at most going give each resolution a very cursory examination... My personal solution to that is basically that I end up not voting at all in many votes, simply through having more important things to do. But I do value easily being able to vote when something more significant than usual comes up, as has happened for Unilever, and ii score highly on that for me.
One other thing to say is that it's so long since I turned the "Voting & Information Service" option on that I don't know what it does if someone turns it on after the email about a vote has gone out but before the voting deadline (ii's deadline is October 22nd for the Unilever votes, by the way - a day or two before the company deadline, presumably to allow the accumulated votes to be passed on to the company). So if one doesn't have it turned on at present, but turns it on now to be able to vote on this issue, I don't know whether one will get an email about it. One might have to go and look in one's "voting mailbox" on the "portfolio" menu, or even conceivably to ask ii to intervene in some way...
(*) This may seem odd, but it's a very standard one, used to deal with a problem in the law about such things: it classifies such things as subscribing to industry associations that sometimes lobby on behalf of the industry as a political donation. Or at least arguably does so - and it's understandable that if there is any doubt about whether it does or not, companies will prefer getting shareholder approval to risking a conflict with the law. The notice of the AGM does normally contain an undertaking not to use the authority to make party-political donations.
(**) Having resolutions to authorise both fundraising and buybacks may seem odd, as they're more-or-less opposites of each other. The explanation is just that both of them are "in case the company needs/wants to" resolutions - it would be rather unusual for both types to be
used in the same year. And both are only up to certain limits because their purpose is to avoid the cost of having another general meeting of the company for reasonably small fundraisings/buybacks.
Gengulphus