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11–6 Open Conference Calls to the Public
graphical representation of performance and variability. The site also includes
direct access to a variety of brokers who can execute orders.
Cost: Installation time:
11–5 PHASE OUT SMALL INVESTORS

A recent study by PriceWaterhouseCoopers indicates that it costs a public corpora-
tion more than $19 each year in servicing costs for each of its shareholders, regardless
of the number of shares held. Since many shareholders only own a few shares, a large
part of this expense is needed to support a group of inconsequential shareholders.
Some of the expense can be eliminated by conducting a periodic “odd-lot”
shareholder program. Under this program, a company contacts those shareholders
with very small holdings and either offers to buy back their shares at a modest
premium or asks the shareholders to buy enough additional shares to bring their
holdings up to a minimum of 100 shares. Though the offer is generally taken by
fewer than half of these small shareholders, it does help to gradually reduce the
number in this group of shareholders.
The trouble with this program is the cost of periodically contacting share-
holders to make them the offer, especially since there tend to be diminishing
returns from the program, with the initial offer clearing out the largest number of
shareholders, while the remaining pool of investors is less likely to accept later
offers. However, one can spread out the timing of successive rounds of offers to
shareholders in order to lower the cost.
Cost: Installation time:

11–6 OPEN CONFERENCE CALLS TO THE PUBLIC

The Securities and Exchange Commission recently issued Regulation FD, which
requires full disclosure of all information normally released by public companies
to investment analysts to the entire investing public. Some companies have
reacted to this ruling by issuing as little information as possible to anyone. How-
ever, the majority have taken the opposite course and become more open in their
informational releases.
A good way to be in compliance with Regulation FD is to open all investor
conference calls to the public. A number of companies provide conference call
services, such as A+ Conference, CogniConference, and RCI. The conference call
services and prices of these companies can be compared on the www.conference
callcompany.com Web site. Besides the price per minute charged, one can also
rate the various services on their ability to provide a Web interface for calls, tran-
scribe calls, mute callers, and so on. One can then arrange with a number of Web-