The “make the world better” activists commonly have resolutions added to the proxy for shareholder votes. Very rarely do these ever get passed and never seen where this helps the stock price. I also am not aware of these types of activists being large investors.
(The counter proof to this is Blackrock which pushes ESG hard and is a large investor as well.)
The “fix the company and increase shareholder value “activists are the more general use of the term. When you hear about activist funds, this is what is being talked about. They try and takeover the Board of Directors and force change.
Eh ... I think that we need to be clear about something, here. I made sure to differentiate different types of SAs (shareholder activists)- some of are motivated by environmental concerns, some by corporate governance concerns, some by financial concerns, some by ethical concerns, etc. This includes everything from "tree huggers" and "higher wage" types to "give us higher dividends" and "you aren't maximizing shareholder value."
I think most people are fairly aware of those in common discussions. However, I think there are also those who benefit from the confusion between the first group and the more specific type of SA here- those who acquire a specific interest in order to immediately capitalize in the short term; common terms used in the past were "Corporate Raider," or "Asset Stripper," or even "Perennial Strike Suit Litigant."
I agree that the umbrella term "activist shareholder" covers all of this (and more). I was making what I thought was the rather banal point that many people were unaware of these distinctions; that they might not know that the asset fund behind this was a Hedge Fund behind this (Alta Fox Capital Management) prides itself on generating "exceptional risk-adjusted returns" and, for example, previously did the same thing with Collector's Universe, Inc., which led to Collector's Universe being sold to an investor group led by ... Nat Turner, you know, the guy they nominated for the board of Hasbro (also, the sale would encumber the target with a lot of debt).
This is all perfectly normal, and I'm not saying it's wrong- I'm just saying that there are different types of shareholder activists, and that there are those who benefit from people unknowingly using the term.
