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.
Top-Down and Bottom-Up Factors
We believe investors who prioritise responsible investment are best served by an investment process that considers both top-down and bottom-up factors.
Integrating ESG analysis at the country, sector and security levels consistent with clients’ investment goals and ESG policies maximises the likelihood of achieving desired performance and improving environmental and social conditions worldwide.
We conduct corporate engagement efforts as part of our fundamental analysis and to clarify or express concerns regarding ESG topics.
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 detail 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
We exercise our proxy voting rights and responsibilities with the assistance of an independent, third-party voting service. Our voting guidelines incorporate geographical variances because of differences in local norms of good governance, regional/local regulatory differences and listing requirements. In addition, institutional guidelines may be structured in accordance with custom sustainable investing standards, which are then communicated to our voting service by our back-office professionals.
To provide transparency about our stewardship activities, we post quarterly engagement and proxy voting reports to our website, which include metrics and detailed engagement examples.
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.
