Bugs and Daffy had it all wrong. It’s not duck season. It’s not wabbit season. It’s proxy season. To demonstrate this point, we spent a few hours beating Excel and Photoshop into submission to come up with this chart.
Proxy season is Marchish through Junish.
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Here, we muse about proxy voting, corporate governance, our startup experience, and whatever else strikes our fancy.
If you'll indulge me with a little Excel geekery, I'll tell you how we made this graphic. Excel's charting facility can't make a chart like this, so we made it directly in the cells of a spreadsheet, using conditional formatting. The grid comprises 365 columns (one for each day) and about 500 rows (one for each company). That's about 182,000 cells.
For each company, we had two dates: the record date and the meeting date. The logic of each cell went something like this: "If I'm between the record date and the meeting date, make me red."
I find it interesting that there is a busy season for proxy voting. Why is March to June the trend?
Joe, it's all driven by the calendar and reporting requirements. Most companies choose to end their fiscal years on December 31, mostly as a matter of convenience and tradition, and they want to present the results of the year at their annual meeting. It takes them about three months to close their books, and a few weeks to schedule the meeting and distribute the proxy materials. And then *boom*, everyone's having their annual meetings in May.
Nice display, Very cool. Compliments for sharing your method – the Excel geeks in the crowd thank you