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Showing posts from December, 2025

The Curious Case of Wood's Swatch Board Activism

In some ways, I could understand investor Steven Wood's debut gambit to join the Swatch Group's Board of Directors. A Swatch in the collection of the Swatch Museum. As near as I can tell, Wood appeared on the scene around eight months ago and began leveling a lot of criticism. He claimed that, in light of his concerns, the Swatch Group Board of Directors should change in composition. Wood's primary allegation seemed to be that the Swatch Group share price didn't grow at a reasonable rate. Now, in those circumstances, the solution for any investor is straightforward: pull your money out or don't put your money there in the first place. Nobody is required to hold Swatch Group shares. But for Wood, the solution seems to be a type of slow-motion managerial coup attempt, one that I find bizarre for many reasons. I'd like to outline those here. First is the fact that this really does seem like a quixotic effort. The founding Hayek family controls something lik...