We recently asked a friend of ours in the proxy contest world how it's going. We received an unexpected reply:

Not very busy right now ... No proxy contests of note in the first Q. I don't think there's even a single multibillion contest on the horizon this season. Some kind of sea change is rolling through the activist ranks - it seems like anyone with a credible reputation for driving value-accretive change is getting board seats without going anywhere near a definitive proxy.

We didn't see this coming.

We wondered, what does the data say? More or fewer? And what would this mean?

The evidence supports our friend's observations. In a current blog post, we show while the number of activist situations remains as high as ever, we see fewer and fewer proxy contests.