La saga Bill Ackman au Canadien Pacifique (CP) est terminée. Le milliardaire américain à la tête du fonds de couverture activiste Pershing Square a liquidé ce qui restait de ses actions dans le CP après un passage pour le moins remarqué au sein du chemin de fer canadien. Un « succès » qui laissera peut-être […]

« From Japan Today comes an interesting column by Yvan Allaire and Francois Dauphin: Now foreign investors, holding over 30% of their shares, are unrelenting in their pressure for Japanese companies to adopt American-style governance. New governance codes have been written and Japanese stock exchanges are pushing for their implementation. Foreign money managers and institutional investors […]

« The message of the Dow/DuPont merger and split up is simple: No firm is today “too big to target.” Activists can see the transaction as evidence that, even in the rare case where they lose a proxy fight (as they did at DuPont last year in a squeaker), the handwriting is still on the […]

« In an October 2015 post, I posed the question: Will a New Paradigm for Corporate Governance Bring Peace to the Thirty Years’ War? As we approach the end of 2015, I thought it would be useful to note some of the most cogent recent developments on which the need, and hope, for a new […]

« This article aims to describe the contemporary objectives and tactics of activist hedge funds as well as the actions taken by the targeted companies as a result of their intervention. In this research, we explore the consequences of activism over time (impact on operational performance and share price returns) and compare these with a random sample of […]

« This article aims to describe the contemporary objectives and tactics of activist hedge funds as well as the actions taken by the targeted companies as a result of their intervention. In this research, we explore the consequences of activism over time (impact on operational performance and share price returns) and compare these with a random sample […]

Les fonds d’investissement dits « activistes » sont l’objet d’une grande attention de la part des médias. Les protagonistes les plus en vue sont traités comme des stars : leurs photos se retrouvent en couverture des plus prestigieux magazines américains, et on sollicite leurs avis sur tous les enjeux économiques. Nouveaux rois de la finance pour certains, sombres […]

« Yvan Allaire and François Dauphin return to a topic on which they have been active and important commentators and analysts; namely, hedge fund activism. Specifically, they report on a new study they conducted: « We … explored, among other things, the consequences of activism over time when compared to a random sample of firms with […]

« Over the last few years, hedge fund activism has received a great deal of coverage in financial media (and in the mainstream press), has triggered heated debates and been the focus of much academic research. Saviour of capitalism for some, for others, activist hedge funds are but mongers of short-term tactics which eventually damage business […]

« With Hillary Clinton’s tax proposals to encourage longer-term investing, the debate over whether American business is too fixated on the short term has moved from the dimly lit offices of earnest policy wonks into the klieg lights of U.S. primary season. Lots of commentators have jumped into the fray to declare that there is […]

« Activist hedge funds can count on a number of supporters in academia and in the media rising up in defense of their actions. No doubt activist hedge funds have found their most persistent academic supporters in Professor Lucian Bebchuk of the Harvard Law School and his co-authors. In several papers, but most particularly in […]

Les fonds de couverture activistes ne sont pas les sauveurs des entreprises, ni à court ni à long terme, réitère Yvan Allaire. Yvan Allaire et François Dauphin affirment avoir exploré les effets de l’activisme au fil du temps, en les comparant à l’évolution d’un échantillon aléatoire de sociétés ouvertes qui avaient des caractéristiques semblables au […]

Au cours des dernières années, les médias financiers (tout comme la presse grand public) ont souvent abordé l’activisme des fonds de couverture, sujet qui a donné lieu à des débats houleux et a fait l’objet de bon nombre de travaux de recherche universitaire. S’ils sont les sauveurs du capitalisme pour certains, pour d’autres, les fonds […]

« The decades-long conflict that is currently raging over short-termism and activist hedge funds strikes me as analogous to the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th Century, albeit fought with statistics (“empirical evidence”), op-eds and journal articles rather than cannon, pike and sword. I decided, after some thirty-six years in the front line of the […]

« The decades-long conflict that is currently raging over short-termism and activist hedge funds strikes me as analogous to the Thirty Years’ War of the 17th Century, albeit fought with statistics (“empirical evidence”), op-eds and journal articles rather than cannon, pike and sword. I decided, after some thirty-six years in the front line of the […]

« This paper aims to describe the contemporary tactics and objectives of activist Hedge Funds as well as the actions taken by targeted companies as a result of their intervention. While doing so, we explored the consequences of activism over time when compared to a random sample of firms with similar characteristics at the time of […]