proxy voting help!

Someone submitted an inane shareholder proposal that requires certain Vanguard index funds to not invest into companies "supporting Somalian genocide". The reason why Vanguard wants you to vote is to defeat this proposal.

I agree with Vanguard, as determining who is and who is not supporting the "genocide" is very difficult, ambiguous and costly.

You can call Vanguard at 1-800-VANGUAR and ask them to assist you with voting. They will forward your call to a vote counting firm, where you can select to vote with management. This is what I did. ix

Frankly for most of us small timers you votes means nothing. It's the big institutions that hold the voting powers.

Institutional Investing should be banned. It creates most of the problems. Employees etc should be able to opt-out and retain the monies that would go into the "pool". Persons need to take more responsibility for managing personal money.

my vanguard index funds have asked me to proxy vote. is there such a thing as a proxy information booklet? i have no idea who these trustees are or what these vaguely worded policies are.

i don't want to vote blind. thanks

Call Vanguard and ask for a brochure.

Mutual funds are a form of institutional investing.

Are you saying that folks should only be able to buy individual stocks? And that those companies shouldn't be able to buy shares in other companies?

You should have gotten one in the mail. Vanguard has a single proxy explanation book which describes these proxy ballots for all 157 of the funds involved.

The question about "to prevent holding investments in companies that, in the judgment of the Board, substantially contribute to genocide" only affects a subset of their funds. The rest of the ballot questions - and board members - are pretty much uniform across all their funds are are meant to streamline and simplify and make uniform many of the funds investment policies.

Here's Vanguard's page about the proxy votes:

And that page has a link which takes you, online, to the entire book they sent. Should be this:

That same anti-genocide proposal has been put on the proxy ballots at a whole bunch of other fund companies funds, too, like Fidelity. Frankly, I think these folks are wasting all of our time and, by forcing the funds to go through with all this balloting, a lot of our money, too.

It's sponsored by this organization:

Vanguard's management's response to this is here:

I should say coerced institutional investing.

lets see if i can respond to everyone so far.

the board actually recommends voting against the avoidance of genocidal funds. i'm assuming they mean because of added cost.

besides the genocide policy, there are trustees to vote on and about

being with vanguard was my choice. i got out of my old employment's firm (fidelity).

i know my vote won't count. but i'm used to voting with no effect. serious. i just like to vote.

ding ding ding. you win the prize. that's what i was looking for. much thanks.