News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
They 'own' them in the literal sense of ownership. Cede and Co is the name recorded on the issuer's stock ledger. In case you aren't familiar, the stock ledger is something issuers are required to maintain and use to track ownership. Very commonly this responsibility is outsourced to companies called Transfer Agents, which themselves need to be SEC approved.
https://www.sec.gov/about/reports-publications/investor-publications/holding-your-securities-get-the-facts
I would definitely encourage checking out the SEC's recently updated page on the options investors have when holding securities. It's very readable and will likely answer your questions.
TLDR - If you own shares in a broker, you are a "beneficial" owner. This means that while the economic and voting impact of ownership are supposed to be passed on to you, you are not the named owner. If you own shares directly on the register of the issuer there is no middleman to pass these things to you.
DRS is not about price impact on any security. There should never be any price impact on a security from investors choosing DRS over an alternative holding method. DRS, rather, allows for other assurances - most critical for me personally are 1. being able to submit shareholder proposals directly to the company without needing to go through other channels and 2. knowing that my votes will not only be cast, but counted. For more on 2, know that over voting is a massive issue in shareholder democracy, and companies holding elections or seeking shareholder input on proposals never get to see that. Proxy vote counting companies truncate or control voting results before reporting.
This is (imo) a fascinating and tragic problem. Here are a couple sources to get you started if you feel the same way.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=904004
https://web.archive.org/web/20060421085925/http://www.rgm.com/articles/FalseProxies.pdf
https://katten.com/files/21384_proxy-vote-processing-issues.pdf
Ownership has two components: benefits and control. If you both benefit from and control your shares already, it doesn't matter whose name is on the certificate. Using CeDe just makes it easier to buy and sell shares. Prior to that people had to literally track down physical owners, call them up, and ask to buy their shares. Read Warren Buffett's biography ("The Snowball"). He did it all the time.
Your home address has your state and country on it. Do they "own" your house in any sense of the word? Their name is on it and you pay them for services for your property. They make rules you have to follow. No, they don't own your house but they do have a responsibility to provide services for it. Should you leave society and set up your own water, septic tank, power, etc.? You can but it's not easier and it doesn't affect the ownership of your property. Same with direct registration.
I agree with you completely regarding the massive improvements to liquidity and settlement with a centralized depository model. The Depository Trust was founded to that end and accomplished it well. However, I do not believe the 'control' of the shares is adequately dispersed to beneficial owners under the current system. See the concerns (long standing over decades) regarding shareholder democracy from my previous comment.