A little Friday reading:

Via CLS Blue Sky Blog, Lawrence Cunningham on the wily Oracle of O vs. Modern Finance Theory:

Threatened by Buffett’s performance, stubborn devotees of modern finance theory resorted to strange explanations for his success. Maybe he is just lucky—the monkey who typed out Hamlet— or maybe he has inside access to information that other investors do not. In dismissing Buffett, modern finance enthusiasts still insist that an investor’s best strategy is to diversify based on betas or dart throwing, and constantly reconfigure one’s portfolio of investments.

Buffett responds with a quip and some advice: the quip is that devotees of his investment philosophy should probably endow chaired professorships at colleges and universities to ensure the perpetual teaching of efficient market dogma; the advice is to ignore modern finance theory and other quasi-sophisticated views of the market and stick to investment knitting. That can best be done for many people through long-term investment in an index fund. Or it can be done by conducting hard-headed analyses of businesses within an investor’s competence to evaluate. In that kind of thinking, the risk that matters is not beta or volatility, but the possibility of loss or injury from an investment.

And NYT's Deal Professor, Steven Davidoff, tells a gripping tale of hedge fund vs family hegemony playing out in Maryland's courts.  CommonWealth REIT is controlled by the Portnoy family, which has made a pretty penny in the process, and 2 hedge funds are trying to get it to change its ways.  

First, the story has implications for the future of shareholder arbitration provisions.  I knew the SEC objects to these puppies at IPO, but didn't think that a board might turn around post-IPO and and adopt amend the bylaws to require arbitration to resolve disputes with shareholders.  Shady.  But apparently that's what happened at CommonWealth REIT.  

And there's more to the story.  

On March 1, CommonWealth’s board passed a bylaw amendment that purports to require that any shareholder wishing to undertake a consent solicitation must, among other things, own 3 percent of the company’s shares for three years. This is an extremely aggressive position that if upheld would stop Corvex and Related in their tracks.

Not satisfied with this attempted knockout blow, CommonWealth appears to have lobbied the Maryland Legislature to amend the Maryland Unsolicited Takeover Act. This law allows companies to have a mandatory staggered board.

CommonWealth already has such a board, but the company has also reportedly lobbied the legislature to make a change that companies opting into this statute would now be unable to have their directors removed by written consent. Again, this would kill Corvex and Related’s campaign. When the two funds got wind of this, they fought back, and the Maryland legislature adjourned without adopting CommonWealth’s proposal.

CommonWealth still announced this week that it had opted into the act. The REIT is claiming that even though the Maryland Legislature did not adopt any amendment, the law still implicitly has this requirement. The funds will now have to sue CommonWealth to force them to change their interpretation.

Go read the whole thing.  Some wacky shenanigans from my home state.  If it does come down to arbitration I'd love to see CommonWealth's arbitrator, allegedly a friend of its controlling family, go toe to toe with the hedge funds' choice-- former Delaware Chancellor Bill Chandler.  

Corporate Governance, Corporate Law, Investing, Takeovers | Bookmark

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