Contest and merger analyses now run at a higher reasoning setting. Three of the four models we use expose an adjustable reasoning level, and all three are now set higher; one model was also upgraded to a stronger reasoning model. The difference is depth as much as length: the analyses engage the activist’s own operating figures alongside the company’s case, adjust reported results for one-time items before judging a trend, and test a proposal against the company’s actual cash position rather than characterizing it. This may produce noticeably longer analyses on contested situations.
Proxy advisory recommendations are reported, not adopted. When a filing announces that a proxy advisory firm has recommended a vote, that is a real fact about the contest and we report it. But it is another firm’s conclusion, not evidence about the company, and it does not stand in for our own reasoning or raise our confidence in it. We also note that a recommendation like this normally reaches us through the quotation of whichever side it favors — so what is being read is that party’s selection from the report, not the report itself.
Material attached to filings is weighed by its source. Contested situations increasingly include exhibits that reproduce social media posts, press clippings and screenshots. A party attaches them because they are favorable, not because they are reliable. A figure whose only source is that kind of material is treated as commentary rather than fact, and is not presented as a company estimate or used to support a conclusion. Figures that carry analytical weight trace to a company disclosure, a financial statement, a regulatory filing, or a named party’s own stated position.
A consensus can now report that the models disagreed. Where the four models do not converge — an even split, or a majority whose dissent is well-grounded rather than mistaken — the consensus strength is shown as Divided instead of being forced into a level that would overstate agreement.
The consensus view names which models reached which conclusion. Where the models agree, it says which ones and on what. Where one dissents, it is named and its reasoning is engaged rather than absorbed into a majority position.
August 31, 2026
Proxy contest and merger analysis pages now show when each model last ran. Every model tab carries its own analysis date, and if any model is behind the most recent run, it is flagged above the tabs. Analyses are re-run after new filings arrive in a contest, and are reviewed manually, typically daily, to ensure they are complete. Each model is re-run independently, so this makes clear at a glance how current each view is.
Company Board of Directors pages now name the proxy statement the board was drawn from, with its filing date. Directors and their titles are shown as disclosed in that filing, and both can change between annual meetings — so the page no longer implies the roster is current as of today.
Filings that cite our own analysis are now excluded from our source material. When a company references a Proxyanalyst analysis in its own soliciting materials, that filing is removed from the documents submitted to the models. Without this, a conclusion we published could return through a company’s filing and be read as independent third-party support for our next one. Our prior conclusions are not evidence for our current ones.
Increased analysis capacity for proxy contests and merger votes. The output allowance for Grok, Gemini and OpenAI was raised to match Claude’s, giving each model room for a fuller analysis, and the OpenAI model was upgraded to GPT-4.1 mini so that the complete set of filings in a large contest is analyzed in a single pass. Contested situations routinely accumulate a dozen or more filings from both sides.
August 6, 2026
Improved how we recognize when a proxy contest or merger vote has concluded. Previously a contest could stay on the active list after its shareholder meeting had passed if we hadn’t recorded a meeting date for it. We now also sweep for contests that have gone quiet and confirm their resolution directly from SEC filings, so completed contests and merger votes are retired promptly and their results captured for review.
July 13, 2026
Corrected the threshold logic used to evaluate director nominees on 3-year total shareholder return (TSR) relative to their peer group. Our voting policy applies a tiered underperformance threshold — companies with strong absolute returns must lag their peers by a wider margin before a director is flagged AGAINST. The analysis engine had been applying the narrower, pre-policy-update thresholds to strongly-performing companies, which flagged some directors AGAINST where the current policy would support them. The thresholds now match the published voting policy, and all affected annual meeting analyses have been re-run with the corrected logic.
Refined how we evaluate director nominees at recently listed companies. The 3-year TSR comparison is now applied only when a company has a full three years of trading history, so a newly public company’s short price record is no longer mistaken for a multi-year track record. Affected analyses were re-run.
Backfilled annual meeting analyses for large-cap companies whose most recent proxy was filed before the analysis feature launched, so the Top Companies page now reflects them.
July 2, 2026
Added a Season Recap page under the Explorer tab, summarizing a completed proxy season across the full IWV universe: Say on Pay and auditor ratification results, director election outcomes, and stockholder proposals — broken down by filer type (individual activist, institutional/pension, ideological) and ask type (governance, disclosure, operational) — with AI vote determinations shown alongside actual reported results where available. Linked from the home page's proxy season tracker.
Backfilled actual vote results (SEC 8-K Item 5.07) for the 2026 season, raising coverage from roughly half of analyzed meetings to 93.6% (2,016 of 2,153). Also fixed a bug in the backfill script that was silently limiting each run to a small subset of eligible companies.
Cleaned up the covered company universe: removed 58 tickers that do not file a DEF 14A with the SEC — foreign private issuers exempt from U.S. proxy rules, a few controlled companies that use an information statement instead of a proxy (including Blackstone and Brookfield Asset Management), and several bank holding companies regulated directly by their banking regulator rather than the SEC. Added several companies that went public in the last quarter, including SpaceX, Cerebras Systems, and Medline.
May 4, 2026
Added a Pay vs. Performance scatter chart under the Explorer tab, plotting CEO total compensation against 3-year relative TSR performance for ~2,000 companies. Points are color-coded by Say on Pay recommendation (red for AGAINST, green for FOR) and sized by market cap. Filter by sector to focus on peer comparisons. Built from the same TSR and compensation data that drives the annual meeting analysis engine.
Added a Risk Concentration heatmap to the Activist Watch page, showing the distribution of high-signal companies by sector and market cap tier at a glance. Cells are color-coded from slate (low) to red (high concentration), with click-through filtering to the company table below.
April 13, 2026
Added Sector and Market Cap filters to the Annual Meetings explorer page. Filters default to Information Technology / Mega Cap and are sticky — your selection carries across all Explorer pages and persists across sessions. The stats bar (Analyzed, Director AGAINST, Say on Pay AGAINST, Auditor AGAINST) now reflects the active filter scope rather than the full universe.
Added a Market Cap filter to the Activist Watch page, matching the filter set on Annual Meetings. The Sector filter on Activist Watch is also now sticky across pages.
Streamlined the Explorer navigation by removing the legacy Sector Explorer (Companies) page. The Explorer tab now defaults directly to Annual Meetings. The Directors table was also fixed to prevent column content from being clipped on standard desktop viewports.
March 30, 2026
The site can now be installed as a home screen app on iPhone (Safari → Share → Add to Home Screen) and Android. It launches full-screen with the Proxyanalyst icon — no browser chrome — giving it the feel of a native app without requiring an App Store download.
New blog post: "Proxy Contest Analysis: How AI Models Evaluate Activist Campaigns" — covers how the four-model approach works, what each model evaluates, and real examples from Lululemon and Pacira BioSciences.
March 27, 2026
Browser extension updated to v1.0.2. Improved company detection on ProxyVote.com, including support for the /pv/agnfwd/ voting flow and CUSIP-based company lookup as a fallback when the company name can't be matched directly from the page.
March 25, 2026
Proxy contest pages now display vote outcomes for resolved contests, sourced from SEC 8-K filings. When a shareholder meeting has taken place and results have been reported, the contest detail page shows the outcome (activist seats won, management seats retained, or settlement/withdrawal), along with individual nominee vote tallies where available. Outcomes are reviewed before being published.
March 23, 2026
Annual meeting pages now show Actual Vote Results sourced from SEC 8-K Item 5.07 filings. For each completed annual meeting, the page displays the official shareholder vote — percent For, vote counts, and pass/fail outcome — for director elections (per nominee), Say on Pay, auditor ratification, and any other proposals voted on. Results are collected automatically each day as new 8-K filings are processed.
March 22, 2026
Added a Proxy Filings tab to all company pages, replacing the single "View Proxy Statement" button. The new page lists all annual proxy filings (DEF 14A) with filed dates and direct links, and surfaces any contest filings separately with a callout linking to the AI contest analysis when an active proxy contest exists for that company.
Added a live proxy season activity panel to the home page, showing real-time counts of annual meeting analyses, active proxy contests, and companies covered — updated daily as new filings are processed.
Updated the Voting Policy to version 0.8, refining the TSR-based director evaluation thresholds and expanding industry ETF coverage to include QABA (Invesco KBW Regional Banking ETF) as the benchmark for community and regional bank companies.
Added support for preliminary proxy contests on the Contests page. Companies where activist or dissident materials have been filed but no full proxy contest has yet been declared are now surfaced in a Preliminary stage, giving users early visibility into developing situations before they escalate to active contests.
March 15, 2026
Added an Annual Meetings explorer page under the Explorer tab, allowing users to browse and filter AI-generated annual meeting analyses across the full IWV universe — filter by sector, vote recommendation, and Say on Pay outcome.
Added an Activist Watch page under the Explorer tab, screening the full IWV universe (~2,500 companies) for signals historically associated with activist investor attention: stock price distress, YTD underperformance, and governance flags (director opposition votes, Say on Pay AGAINST recommendations). Companies are scored and ranked by High, Medium, and Low signal tiers.
Expanded the Voting Policy to version 0.7, adding coverage of Stockholder Proposals and Charter Amendments. The framework incorporates filer identity, prior-year vote results, type of ask (disclosure vs. operational vs. governance), and a political valence test for ideologically motivated proposals from either direction.
Redesigned the Contests page to separate Active and Past contests. Active contests now show a countdown badge with the upcoming vote deadline (highlighted in amber when 7 days or fewer remain). After the shareholder meeting date passes, contests automatically move to a Past Contests section and are removed from the page entirely after 90 days.
March 12, 2026
Added Annual Meeting Analysis tab to company pages. Claude AI reads each company's proxy filing and applies a transparent voting policy to generate vote recommendations — FOR or AGAINST — for Director Elections, Say on Pay, and Auditor Ratification, with individual rationales for each director.
Added a Voting Policy page under About, documenting the full proxy voting guidelines used in annual meeting analyses, including version history.
Annual meeting pages now include a Compensation Peer Group section showing the peer companies each company discloses in its proxy filing for executive compensation benchmarking.
Added three new proxy contests: Janus Henderson Group (JHG) — Victory Capital bid vs. Trian/General Catalyst merger; CarMax (KMX) — Starboard Value activist campaign; Pacira BioSciences (PCRX) — DOMA Perpetual Capital Management campaign.
March 4, 2026
Added job to extract Director biographies from proxy filings, backfilled Director bios across the IWV universe and added to the daily job. Also cleaned up Director listings through additional logic checks to remove non-Director Executives from the Director page.
February 16, 2026
Enhanced Contests section to support multiple proxy contests with an index page and individual detail pages for each ticker
February 15, 2026
Updated Stocks list with latest components from Wilshire 3000
Fixed Search issue where search was being re-triggered in a loop
January 4, 2026
Added a Contests page for contested proxy solicitations. Proxy materials are reviewed by the major AI models independently, then compared and evaluated for consensus by Claude.ai.
November 9, 2025
Added a "Most Recent Filings" page under Companies to highlight the most recent proxy filings processed and added to the database with Executive and Director information
October 4, 2025
Updated Executive compensation chart logic to display the most recent title
July 26, 2025
Upgraded Executive bio generation to Grok-4 and increased token limit to support expanded bio creation
July 14, 2025
Launched new Data page with executive compensation statistics
Added comprehensive data coverage information
Implemented dynamic data updates from SEC filings
June 29, 2025
Replaced rechart component with chart.js for system improvements
Bug fix on Explorer Pages to fix mapping issue with Communication sector
June 22, 2025
Initial platform launch
Executive compensation search and analysis features
