Proxy

The Jolly Contrarian’s Glossary The snippy guide to financial services lingo.™ Go Premium Index — Click the ᐅ to expand: Glossary Comments? Questions? Suggestions? Requests? Insults? We’d love to 📧 hear from you. Sign up for our newsletter.

Careful: do not confuse with “poxy”.

Corporate actions

A person sent along to a shareholders’ meeting (and AGM, EGM, that kind of thing) with a piece of paper entitling her to vote on behalf of a registered shareholder. A special type of agent.

Phantom antipodean children, spouse, etc.

Also, a sort of synthetic jet-lag, caused by cohabiting with people — children, usually — who have actual jet-lag.

Middle-management

Any shorthand, heuristic or a second-order derivative which enables a person with no subject matter expertise to instantly evaluate something complex, intractable, constitutionally incapable of instant evaluation — the sort of thing that requires a lifetime’s market expertise to properly assess. For example, a credit rating in place of a systematic analysis of the business fundamentals of a multinational corporation.

Also: a five-star rating for a book review, or a three-point rating in a performance appraisal.

See also

• Annual general meeting
• Extraordinary general meeting
• Proxy jetlag
• Seeing Like a State
• Goals