This post is inspired by an article that was in the Economist, edition dated 7 - 13 February. You may read the following article here: http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21642175-sometimes-ill-mannered-speculative-and-wrong-activists-are-rampant-they-will-change-american While this is just a sub-topic of the entire article, I believe this would likely be the future of our market if more investors turn towards passive investing via ETFs. ETF investing may prove to be most rewarding to an investor where it requires the least effort but able to  replicate the market returns, which averages beat the average inflation rate. However, when you are investing into ETFs, the index fund uses your money to invest into the underlying basket of stocks. This means that while you have the ownership of the underlying companies' shares via the index fund, you are indirectly transferring the rights of these ownership to the index fund. This can known as the proxy voting which shareholders would receive ......