By Jeff Schoenborn, Managing Director
Bloomberg reported that the Securities and Exchange Commission is “shelving a controversial plan to allow most hedge funds to keep their stock investments secret after public companies and other critics blasted the proposal as a major blow to market transparency, said people familiar with the matter.”
While we await official confirmation from the commission, we’d like to thank our clients and other friends of the firm who supported calls by Lambert’s investor relations practice, the National Investor Relations Institute, hundreds of corporate issuers and other IR professionals for the proposal’s withdrawal.
On July 10, the SEC surprised public companies, IR professionals and the financial community with proposed 13F rule changes that would dramatically reduce the number of institutional investment managers disclosing their stock holdings, reducing transparency in the capital markets and disproportionally impacting smaller public companies. On July 20, Lambert took the rare step of publicly taking a position on securities regulation, given our analysis of the proposal’s potential impact on our public company clients. By August 18, Lambert was among the first corporate or professional organizations to submit a public comment on the matter to the SEC.