Livestream All Investor-Management Meetings?
render unto everyone
Alright, so: this is not my domain, those of you who know better should definitely pipe up below.
There's this weird situation where management at public companies are not allowed to selectively disclose any "material" information to individual investors. The basic idea is that if a company CEO tells one investor any good/bad news before the rest of the world finds out, that investor can buy/sell shares before other people do, and that's not Fair.
But big investors still ask for meetings with management, and there's this awkward inbetweeness to it all: management is not supposed to tell the investors any material nonpublic information, i.e. nothing that could reasonably be used in an investment decision, i.e. there should be no reason for the investors to want to meet with management at all. And yet they do want to meet with management! Weird, no?
There's this obvious insinuation that, in fact, management are disclosing information that is in some sense material. But it seems to be accepted that this is happening at some squishy margin and not through management whispering secrets to the investors directly. According to the internet, some investors' compliance departments force them to record all their meetings with management so they can prove later that no material nonpublic information was disclosed.
But why not go one further, then? With modern technology, is there a reason why we can't require that all investor-management meetings be livestreamed? Then there should really be no question of anyone getting an advantage by meeting with management: either the information is truly not-material, so it doesn't matter if everyone hears it, or the information is kinda secretly material after all, in which case everyone should have an equal right to access it.