Hedge fund vs index fund

Passively managed funds are under attack again. Last summer Carl Icahn famously blasted fixed income ETFs and this month, Bill Ackman devotes one third of Pershing Square’s annual letter to investors to criticizing index funds.

To start, the letter suggests that as asset flow to index funds accelerates it creates momentum in the indexes they seek to represent which raises the bar for hedge funds benchmarking to those indexes.  Violins.  Returns are down among activist managers and when looking at individual stocks, excess gain from activist campaigns dropped significantly from 2012 to 2015.  S&P’s US Activist Interest Index is down 31% in the last year.

His primary claim is that index funds have no incentive to pursue good governance at companies within their portfolio and cannot have the bandwidth to make intelligent proxy decisions. “Index funds managers are not compensated for investment performance, but rather for growing assets under management. They are principally judged on the basis of how closely they track index performance and how low their fees are. While index fund managers are, of course, fiduciaries for their investors, the job of overseeing the governance of the tens of thousands of companies for which they are major shareholders is an incredibly burdensome and almost impossible job. Imagine having to read 20,000 proxy statements which arrive in February and March and having to vote them by May when you have not likely read the annual report, spent little time, if any, with the management or board members, and haven’t been schooled in the industries which comprise the index.”

He cites the example of Dupont when last year index managers who owned 18% of the stock voted against board members proposed by Trian Capital Management.  He also says that the lack of index fund support for Pershing Square’s teaming with Valeant to buy Allergan shows how those firms “did not take this issue [corporate governance] seriously.”

This is an extremely thin argument, especially the case involving Valeant in which the legality of Pershing Square’s actions were broadly questioned.  In reality, index fund companies are getting much more involved in governance and are engaged with corporations and their boards. Evidence is everywhere. BlackRock, State Street and Vanguard are members of the Shareholder-Director Exchange, a group formed to enhance shareholder-director engagement.

Recently, Doug Braunstein of Hudson Executive Capital called Michelle Edkins, BlackRock’s head of corporate governance, the most powerful person in corporate America because of BlackRock’s ability to influence corporate boardrooms.

The assertion that index managers are not motivated by performance is wrong.  If indexes keep going up, assets will keep flowing in.  The index manager is constrained in terms of allocation of the portfolio and cannot sell an underperformer.  This creates a powerful incentive to ensure that index constituents perform.  Governance is the steering wheel whereby passive investors can influence performance.  This makes them natural allies of activists, not disinterested bystanders as Ackman might have us believe.

Larry Fink CEO of BlackRock which manages $2.7 trillion in index funds wrote an open letter to 500 CEOs encouraging a new focus on clear long-term vision, strategic direction and credible metrics against which to assess performance. “At BlackRock we want companies to be more transparent about their long-term strategies so that we can measure them over a long cycle. If a company gives us a five-year or a 10-year business plan, we can measure throughout the period to see if it’s living up to the plan. Is it investing the way it said it would? Is it repaying capital to shareholders?” he asks.

To me this is about getting leverage on corporations and holding them accountable.

As index fund managers ramp up their focus on governance, there is broad opportunity for activists to tap into that growing sector for support because to a large extent, their interests are aligned.  What activists have to worry about is the possibility that index funds diverge from hedge funds and forge their own path in advancing the governance principles they perceive as enhancing long term corporate performance.  Braunstein predicts that in five years every public company will have an investor member on its board.

The SDX is one example of how index fund managers are pursuing a governance agenda independent of activists.   Last month another step in going it alone was taken when it was announced that BlackRock is among the founders of Focusing Capital on the Long Term, a group of large global investors which also founded the S&P Long-Term Value Creation Global Index.