Sunday 8 March 2020

Against transparency!

The more time I spend looking at disclosures from investors, the less sense a lot of it makes to me. I've blogged quite a bit about meaningless Stewardship Code reporting, with dozens of hedge / boutique funds using exactly the same blurb. We are about to be hit by a wave of SRDII reporting that I think will repeat the same pattern.
I really question whether there is any point to all this reporting. I doubt most of these funds will ever aspire to be active 'stewards' of companies, and that's fine, most people that invest with them understand that. I am also sceptical that anyone reads the stewardship blurbs produced by managers or uses them to base asset allocation decisions on.
There's obviously a mini industry in producing compliance statements, which is probably going to matched over time by people within consulting or auditing firms who will assess them. So to the extent that there is interaction between people over the content of these disclosures it will be between people who write blurb and people who read blurb. It will not be between people who have capital to invest and people who are paid to invest capital, which would seem to be what we were all aiming at when the Stewardship Code came in ten years ago.
So if a lot of disclosure is meaningless, it goes largely unread, the only people who pay attention to it are compliance people (and compliance service providers) and consultants, and the firms who are making the disclosures are unlikely to change anyway, what's the point? It just seems to be imposing a cost.

No comments: