Stewardship at Fisher Investments


The objective of FI’s stewardship activities is to understand and evaluate companies to help reduce financially material risk and enhance returns. FI incorporates stewardship in a manner that simultaneously focuses on our fiduciary duty to clients and supporting client desires for long-term results whilst allowing for repeatability in the application of our investment process.

Stewardship involves multiple teams across FI’s Portfolio Management Group and Institutional Group. The teams work together to help ensure stewardship is aligned across the different functions.

FI does not undertake stewardship activities for purposes of changing or influencing control of a company.

Link to Stewardship Policy

Corporate Engagement Overview

As an active investment manager on behalf of its and its subsidiaries’ clients, FI engages with companies as part of its fundamental analysis and to clarify or express concerns over potential issues at the firm or industry level.

FI endeavours to engage with companies across sectors and in both developed and emerging markets. This includes companies in equity strategies and, to a lesser degree, fixed income strategies. Financially material information uncovered during engagement is incorporated into our fundamental analysis. The period of time needed to address engagement discussion topics may exceed our normal investment time horizon, and FI recognises engagement as a way to address longer-term risks and opportunities.

Engagement Process

The topics of engagements are informed by FI’s top-down Economic, Political and Sentiment drivers, country, sector and thematic preferences, as well as bottom-up fundamental analysis. Such topics may include ESG related topics to the extent they have a material impact on the risk or return of a security (‘Sustainability Risks’).

Our top-down engagement selection process uses multiple factors to identify potential risks and opportunities and allows us to generate focus lists. We further vet the lists based on bottom-up company research.

In addition to our primary engagement sources, we monitor our holdings on an ongoing basis utilising a combination of qualitative and quantitative resources. This information, supplemented by FI’s in-house company research, is used to identify companies where there may be opportunities for engagement.

We also consider engaging with management whenever concerns arise related to a company’s business.

Quarterly Engagement Reports

Quarterly corporate engagement reports describe the number of engagements with companies in which we invest, their sector, a summary of events, and conclusions to provide insight, transparency, and clarity to the ESG vetting process.

View the available reports:

Proxy Voting: Differentiated Approach

Where authorised to do so, FI votes proxies on behalf of clients. When doing so, FI votes with the best interests of our clients in mind. FI utilises Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) as its third-party proxy voting service provider.

FI’s Proxy Voting Committee oversees the firm’s proxy voting and serves as the control point for decisions relating to proxy voting. The members of the Proxy Voting Committee include senior leadership from our Research, Portfolio Management, and Investment Operations groups.

Previous fiscal quarters’ proxy voting reports can be viewed below.

EU/EEA Equities Shareholder Engagement Policy

In accordance with Fisher Investments Ireland Limited’s (FII) shareholder engagement policy, please review the proxy voting reports provided on this page for the annual disclosure on how such policy has been implemented for the previous year. As noted in such policy, the proxy voting reports only include data for FII’s clients who have authorized and directed FII to vote proxies. Only certain Fisher Investments Institutional Group clients have given FII such authorization and direction. Therefore, there is no proxy voting report (and therefore no annual disclosure under FII’s shareholder engagement policy) for non-institutional clients of FII.

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Fisher Investments Ireland Limited trades as Fisher Investments Europe (FIE) and is regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland. Fisher Investments Ireland Limited and its trading name Fisher Investments Europe are registered with the Companies Registration Office in Ireland under numbers 623847 and 629724. Fisher Investments (FI) is an investment adviser registered with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. FIE is wholly-owned by Fisher Asset Management, LLC, trading as Fisher Investments, which is majority owned and controlled by Fisher Investments, Inc. Since inception, Fisher Investments, Inc. has been 100% privately owned. FIE outsources portfolio management to FI.