Owners Access Companies Directly

Next week a bunch of investors, who among them control $9 trillion of assets and are among the biggest shareholders at hundreds of public companies, will all get together in Boston to meet, privately, with the chief executive officers of a bunch of big public consumer-staples companies, including Walmart Inc., Coca-Cola Co. and Clorox Co. We talk a lot around here about a controversial theory that big diversified institutional investors who are large shareholders in all the companies in the same industry will somehow discourage those companies from competing with each other, leading to higher consumer prices and more profits for those investors to share. And I always say, well, it is not like Fidelity and T. Rowe Price and Capital Group all get together with the CEOs of all the companies in an industry to talk about how they should be running their businesses. Except next week I mean! Also there’ll be a health-care one in Baltimore in November.

The good news is that the big investors are not meeting the big companies to tell them how to run their businesses. (Maybe!) They’re meeting them to get nonpublic information that they can use to outperform other investors who do not have access to all the CEOs. Bloomberg reports: