About

Advocate Partners is a private company established specifically to undertake active shareholder advocacy as a means of achieving superior returns on share investments.

We firmly believe in the following:

"Investing in companies with identifiable deficiencies, then implementing high governance and operational standards with an unyielding focus on shareholder objectives, translates into greater shareholder returns"

Advocate Partners’ investment model involves:

Identifying and investing in listed companies where there is a substantial discount of the share price to intrinsic value and using active shareholder advocacy techniques to address strategic deficiencies and to unlock value for all investors.

The shareholder advocacy phenomenon has been a long time coming. In Australia, most investors, including large institutional investors, remain passive investors. Shareholders have been crying to be heard for many years. It is only in the last five years or so that smaller shareholders are demanding that listed companies pay more attention to their concerns. To date, much of the effort has focused on shareholder activism at AGMs, which while being a good start, generally does not have much ‘traction’ with the companies themselves.  

The shareholder activists, in general, are not united enough and individually do not have enough ‘skin in the game’ to be taken seriously by the companies concerned. With the advent of shareholder advocacy, the advocate attains a substantial shareholding in a company of interest, or at least is able to act as a proxy for a substantial proportion of shareholders, such that he/she is able to actively influence the direction of the company and/or cause appropriate changes to take place for the better within the company.

In the US, shareholder advocacy is a phenomenon that is now increasingly driving change in corporations. Changes may be very wide in nature, ranging from executive remuneration and the adoption of ‘green’ practices to operational efficiency via corporate restructuring and business process improvement.