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Comment by eries | Hacker News Reader

If the reforms are embodied in the company's charter, they will follow the shares wherever they are traded

sorry if this is an ignorant question - but what about activist investors and hostile takeovers? shareholder voting rights are still a thing, aren't they?

I do think there is such a thing as good activism, when investors use their own long-term position in a company to insist on changes and accountability which they plan to benefit from over time. And I also think there is bad activism, which has a different tenor and character.

Good governance means, in part, shifting the power structures of the corporation to make it easier to do the good and harder to do the bad kinds of activism.

Can you explain what this means?

I'll try: The charter governs the relationship of the company to its investor. A share of stock is a contract between those parties. The charter controls what the stock "means" no matter where it trades.

If I've understood the intent correctly, the individual investor side of LTSE is only a small part of the picture. The biggest part is that the company itself is setup for long-term focus via its principles[0] -- as one example, compensating executives not based solely on hitting a single quarter's numbers, but on performance over the long term.

So long as a company adheres to those principles, it doesn't matter if an individual investor can obtain their shares via ShortTermScumbags.com or the like. Having investors who are along for the long haul is a nice-to-have, not a must-have, since the goal is long-term focused companies which will naturally, via its principles, eschew reacting to short-term trends in share price.

[0] https://longtermstockexchange.com/listings/principles/

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