The votes are tallied, and Saxe wins again, but...

REFR filed its 10-Q for Q2 2008 this morning. No real surprises in the results; Hitachi's payments now comprise about 75% of REFR's revenues (and they're probably more embarrassed about it every day). Oh, and the zero-cash point scooted back to the other side of January 1, 2010.

What looks to be most notable is the results of the proxy battle. To nobody's surprise, Robert Saxe and Robert Budin were easily re-elected, but the number of shares withheld surprisingly (to me anyway) exceeded 10% of the shares outstanding. The auditor, BDO Seligman, came off relatively unscathed, only getting a little under 5% withholding.

But it was the proxy initiatives, the Equity Incentive Plan and the sales disclosures, that were in fact quite surprisingly contentious. Make no mistake; managment was never in danger of not getting its way on both votes, but the final numbers were nonetheless a surprise. For some reason, only 6.6 million shares, less than half of the outstanding and number recorded for the board elections, were recorded for the proxy items. And of those, the results were roughly identical: about a 5-to-2 margin backing management's recommendations both times. Still, that's over a quarter of the voting shares participating in the "revolt", far more than I thought we'd see.

Perhaps that might explain the eerie near-silence on the REFR message boards these days, if the meeting was as contentious as the voting suggests, there may be a lot harder feelings over this than are visible on the surface. And management may well have been shaken up by this after all, even as the leader of the insurgency looks to have trudged away in despair. If nothing else, it looks like they've been given notice that loyalty among the shareholders has eroded quite dramatically, and that next time they might actually be in some danger of not getting their way.

Exuent the indices

Finally post #200. It took a lot longer than I thought it would, given the pace at which I was going when I started. But when there's really nothing more to say on a subject, there's not a whole lot you can do about it.

Anyway, the news this time is that one of REFR's two largest institutional holders, Vanguard Group, has liquidated nearly all of its REFR holdings. This has significance because Vanguard, along with Barclay's Global Investments, are the two biggest managers of index funds, funds that are supposed to hold positions in everything, irrespective of investment worthiness.

It was embarassing enough that these two far-and-away topped the list of institutional holders, meaning that few if any funds were interesting in a position in REFR on its merits. But with Vanguard giving way (single-handedly reducing institutional investment in REFR by nearly 30%), Barclay's is set to become the lone institution with a position in REFR greater than 40,000 shares (unless some other institution picked up an outsized portion of Vanguard's position).

And so the end comes one step closer. I'm seriously doubting this blog will ever see post 300.

Update: It was pointed out on the message boards that the "mffais" site has Vanguard Group drastically reducing positions in just about every stock it holds. With a lack of news to confirm such action it seems this may not be what it seems after all. Sorry!