Читать книгу Corporate Actions - A Concise Guide - Francis Groves - Страница 4

Preface

What the book covers

Corporate actions are normally considered as incidental to the business of investing and marketing investments, but the aim of this concise guide is to look at the subject of corporate actions in the round, defining what corporate actions are, listing and describing the main corporate actions and showing how individual corporate actions are applied to investors’ holdings of securities. This will give an overview of the way in which the corporate actions processing function works both in the UK and other important global markets. Detailing all the differences between jurisdictions is beyond the scope of this guide, though the UK is taken as a starting point to help describe and explain significant national distinctions, particularly for the United States and the rest of the European Union.

Who the book is for

The guide is designed to be an introduction to corporate actions for investment industry practitioners in general. Those starting out in corporate actions processing will find it a helpful outline, but it is also designed to be useful for all who encounter corporate actions tangentially in disciplines such as fund management or financial advice provision. Different industry participants have differing interests in corporate actions, and for the sake of consistency the guide is (mainly) written from the point of view of the beneficial owners of securities.

How the book is structured

Those who simply require a handy and straightforward introduction to specific corporate actions will find the quick guide to the content and the glossary of corporate actions terms especially useful.

The first three chapters deal exclusively with equity corporate actions. These chapters cover definitions of a corporate action and the legal framework(s) underpinning corporate actions, followed by a look at the most significant actions one by one, and then a detailed examination of the staging of some of these. The corporate actions of debt securities are given separate treatment in Chapter 11.

In Chapters 4, 5 and 6 the focus moves from the corporate actions themselves to the industry that has grown up to process them. These three chapters cover respectively the corporate actions industry, its efficiency and its progress (recent and future).

Chapter 7 looks at the impact of successive corporate actions on one particular share (Encore Oil) and shareholdings in it. This is followed by a look at the scope investors have for influencing such events through shareholder voting.

The final chapter looks at how corporate actions are treated in the context of stock indices, stock charts and a number of more complex investments.

Although change in the corporate actions industry is sometimes slow (it has been described as glacial) the process is always evolving, and so this guide can only aim to be a snapshot of the state of affairs at the time of writing, together with an outline of some of the forces for change that are at work. The aim has been to provide sufficient detail to give the reader a working model that is practically helpful in navigating the corporate actions universe.