A total of 758 companies received public demands from activist investors last year – a 13 percent increase on the number of targeted companies in 2015, according to The Activist Investing Annual Review.
In the review, Josh Black, editor-in-chief of Activist Insight, notes that ‘for activists, 2016 was a disjointed year, with mixed fortunes either side of the summer’.
In this video, we explore why activists’ fortunes changed in 2016, both from a political and economic perspective.
On the result of the US election, Black says: ‘In many cases it turned flat years into double-digit years, halved losses and made activism a hot strategy again… There’s a lot of optimism that tax reform, repatriation of overseas capital [and] deregulation can help spur some of the industries that activists have been piling into recently to new and greater heights.’
Black also talks about how the drop in the price of sterling after the Brexit referendum made UK stocks attractive to US investors and whether there is still value to be found in the public markets.
Watch the video below and look out for next week’s video, where Black discusses activism trends around the world.
