One responsibility of owning stock and mutual funds is voting for or against board members and other resolutions that are filed each year at the annual meeting of shareholders. Some of these shareholder-sponsored resolutions concern such things as asking the company to report on or reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. You get one vote per share, use it or lose it.

Did you know that 30% of all publicly traded stock is held by individual investors? Unfortunately, many of those individual investors never get around to voting their proxies, let alone attending the annual meeting. As a result, shareholder resolution results are dictated by the giant institutional investors who vote their proxies, often without your values in mind.

In an effort to remedy this imbalance, some neat online services have cropped up to help shareowners efficiently vote their shares in alignment with their values. One very creative solution is coordinated by a company called Moxy Vote.

Here's how Moxy Vote works:

First, you sign up and link your brokerage account to Moxy Vote. Next, you select "advocates" (think sustainability and responsibility minded asset managers such as Calvert, Domini; or NGOs) that you want to align your proxy votes with. You can either vote each proxy individually after reviewing your advocate's position, or you can choose to have Moxy Vote automatically vote each proxy in accordance with your "advocates" position. And...the service is currently free!

Watch their little video that describes how it all works.

 
Moxy Vote isn't the only new proxy voting service that has cropped up, there's a few others. Let us know if you'd like to check out those also.

 

Most of our clients have their proxy voting taken care of under one of our service agreements and according to sustainability and responsibility criteria. But maybe your curious about trying out Moxy Vote, or you have shares elsewhere you need to vote. So let us know if you want a hand, or just sign up and let us know how it went. We are here to serve you!