How Revolutionary New Activist Investment Platform Tulipshare Is Letting People ‘Vote With Their Money’ To Take Action At Apple, Amazon, Coca-Cola And More - Forbes | Canada News Media
How Revolutionary New Activist Investment Platform Tulipshare Is Letting People ‘Vote With Their Money’ To Take Action At Apple, Amazon, Coca-Cola And More – Forbes
Tulipshare is a brand new activist investment platform that empowers individuals to make a positive change within some of the biggest household-name companies in the world like Apple, Amazon and Coca-Cola. Launched in the UK in July 2021, the platform enables people to rethink the way they invest in businesses. Essentially allowing people to vote with their money, Tulipshare endeavours to play a tangible role in promoting ethical change in the boardrooms of global companies.
The platform’s first causes include workers’ rights at Amazon, a focus on Coca-Cola’s contribution to climate change in the company’s plastic consumption, and right to repair issues at Apple. New causes will regularly be added to the platform for budding activists to begin fighting for change via the purchasing of shares.
To date, Tulipshare has raised $1M in pre-seed funding from Speedinvest and high profile business angels. The platform has already been regulated in the UK by the Financial Conduct Authority since April 2021 and is looking to expand to the US market.
I caught up with Founder and CEO Antoine Argouges to find out more about this ground-breaking approach to shareholder activism.
Afdhel Aziz: Antoine, welcome. Please tell us about Tulipshare and how it works?
Antoine Argouges: Tulipshare is a unique activist investment platform that allows investors to coalesce around important causes and use their shareholder rights to drive positive change. We are the first broker to combine shareholder activism with online brokerage.
You can join the platform and invest by selecting a campaign you are interested in, such as pushing for Coca-Cola to use 100% recycled materials in its packaging, and buy shares in the company with the knowledge that your shareholder rights will be used to push this cause with the company directly. For the first time, your voice will combine with other like minded voices to drive change.
Antoine Argouges, Founder and CEO of Tulipshare
Tulipshare
Aziz: How did the idea come about and what has been the take-up so far? Can anyone in the world invest via the platform?
Argouges: If you look around and ask all your friends and family who have previously bought shares or made investments, very few would have ever voted on a shareholder resolution. Most people, due to no fault of their own, do not know that every share has shareholder rights attached to it. When those shareholder rights are utilized in the right way – they can be used to drive change in a company.
Only $25,000 worth of stock held for over 1 year is needed to be able to submit a shareholder proposal in the US. While shareholder proposals have been utilised for years by large institutional players, there’s been a lack of public awareness about shareholder rights more widely and no real attempt to unify the voices of individual investors, also known as retail investors. This has left corporate strategy almost exclusively in the hands of boards and large institutional players. This must change, which is why I have launched Tulipshare.
We are seeing a very good uptake on the platform since launching. Our average deposit value is currently around $234 and we are predicting over 100,000 investors to join the platform by next year. We are welcoming users from around the world to join the movement, but only UK residents are able to trade on the platform for the time being. We are actively working to obtain our broker-dealer license in the US and EU in the next 12 months. Our campaigns are cumulative and every new country opening for us will only strengthen our voice.
Aziz: Please tell us about some of the campaigns you are currently running and how you chose them? Do you feel in future your customers can also propose companies and campaigns?
Argouges: There are currently three campaigns live on the platform: changing Coca-Cola’s packaging policy to use 100% recycled materials, ensuring fair and safe working environments for Amazon warehouse workers, and allowing independent and third-party technicians to repair Apple products.
We selected these campaigns for their global impact and their capacity to improve our lives, and to make the planet a better place. For the first time, a unified group of retail investors will be purposefully supporting strategic change in these companies. This is a unique message we want to send to boards of directors and executive teams alike – they can rely on us to engage with them and push for change.
For future campaigns, we are building a user-generated activism tool where the Tulipshare community will be able to suggest ideas themselves and mobilise change on topics that are important to them.
Tulipshare is a brand new activist investment platform that empowers individuals to make a positive … [+] change within some of the biggest household-name companies in the world.
Tulipshare
Aziz: Do you think GenZ will be receptive to the idea of buying stocks to influence company decisions, just as much as protesting in the streets?
Argouges: I certainly think GenZ will be receptive to the idea of buying stocks to influence company decisions. They have been trying to influence their future for years now with limited impact, which can of course be demoralising. Protesting and voting is still on their radar, but now they have another option that we have engineered for them: the ability to engage companies through their investments and have the potential to make a real difference at the top.
93% of the population do not hold shares. The commission-free brokers and impact investment firms out there, I believe, need to do a greater job at convincing younger retail investors to influence company decisions.
Tulipshare’s unique position to unify investors and give them a voice to impact corporate policies is touching the heart of GenZ and every value-driven investor, from GenZ to Millennials to Boomers.
Aziz: Finally, it feels like we are in a new era of activist retail investors feeling like they can go up against the big institutional investors – especially after Gamestop. Is this fuelling interest, do you think?
Argouges: The Gamestop saga improved the financial literacy of millions of retail investors in just a couple of weeks. The tables had turned – retail investors were moving the market and which then got shut down. This situation has only shown how openly the system is skewed against retail investors, which plays nicely alongside our narrative of engineering a way for people to vote with their money and have their voice heard.
NEW YORK (AP) — Shares of Tesla soared Wednesday as investors bet that the electric vehicle maker and its CEO Elon Musk will benefit from Donald Trump’s return to the White House.
Tesla stands to make significant gains under a Trump administration with the threat of diminished subsidies for alternative energy and electric vehicles doing the most harm to smaller competitors. Trump’s plans for extensive tariffs on Chinese imports make it less likely that Chinese EVs will be sold in bulk in the U.S. anytime soon.
“Tesla has the scale and scope that is unmatched,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, in a note to investors. “This dynamic could give Musk and Tesla a clear competitive advantage in a non-EV subsidy environment, coupled by likely higher China tariffs that would continue to push away cheaper Chinese EV players.”
Tesla shares jumped 14.8% Wednesday while shares of rival electric vehicle makers tumbled. Nio, based in Shanghai, fell 5.3%. Shares of electric truck maker Rivian dropped 8.3% and Lucid Group fell 5.3%.
Tesla dominates sales of electric vehicles in the U.S, with 48.9% in market share through the middle of 2024, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Subsidies for clean energy are part of the Inflation Reduction Act, signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022. It included tax credits for manufacturing, along with tax credits for consumers of electric vehicles.
Musk was one of Trump’s biggest donors, spending at least $119 million mobilizing Trump’s supporters to back the Republican nominee. He also pledged to give away $1 million a day to voters signing a petition for his political action committee.
In some ways, it has been a rocky year for Tesla, with sales and profit declining through the first half of the year. Profit did rise 17.3% in the third quarter.
The U.S. opened an investigation into the company’s “Full Self-Driving” system after reports of crashes in low-visibility conditions, including one that killed a pedestrian. The investigation covers roughly 2.4 million Teslas from the 2016 through 2024 model years.
And investors sent company shares tumbling last month after Tesla unveiled its long-awaited robotaxi at a Hollywood studio Thursday night, seeing not much progress at Tesla on autonomous vehicles while other companies have been making notable progress.
TORONTO – Canada’s main stock index was up more than 100 points in late-morning trading, helped by strength in base metal and utility stocks, while U.S. stock markets were mixed.
The S&P/TSX composite index was up 103.40 points at 24,542.48.
In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 192.31 points at 42,932.73. The S&P 500 index was up 7.14 points at 5,822.40, while the Nasdaq composite was down 9.03 points at 18,306.56.
The Canadian dollar traded for 72.61 cents US compared with 72.44 cents US on Tuesday.
The November crude oil contract was down 71 cents at US$69.87 per barrel and the November natural gas contract was down eight cents at US$2.42 per mmBTU.
The December gold contract was up US$7.20 at US$2,686.10 an ounce and the December copper contract was up a penny at US$4.35 a pound.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 16, 2024.
TORONTO – Canada’s main stock index was up more than 200 points in late-morning trading, while U.S. stock markets were also headed higher.
The S&P/TSX composite index was up 205.86 points at 24,508.12.
In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was up 336.62 points at 42,790.74. The S&P 500 index was up 34.19 points at 5,814.24, while the Nasdaq composite was up 60.27 points at 18.342.32.
The Canadian dollar traded for 72.61 cents US compared with 72.71 cents US on Thursday.
The November crude oil contract was down 15 cents at US$75.70 per barrel and the November natural gas contract was down two cents at US$2.65 per mmBTU.
The December gold contract was down US$29.60 at US$2,668.90 an ounce and the December copper contract was up four cents at US$4.47 a pound.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 11, 2024.
