The Advisors' Blog

A recent Willis Towers Watson memo looks at how S&P 100 stock ownership & retention guidelines have changed since 2015. The firm’s summary notes that these guidelines haven’t changed much since last year – but there’s been a definitive shift since 2015.

The WTW team shares these predictions about where stock ownership guidelines & retention requirements could be heading:

CEO salary multiples will likely be the main point of interest for ownership guidelines in years to come. Going above 6x salary for the CEO is becoming more common, but it is unclear whether this will turn into the majority practice.

Linking stock retention requirements to ownership guidelines is also worth considering, as the overall increase in companies with retention requirements is largely attributed to guideline-dependent policies specifically. Guideline-dependent policies totaled 83% of retention requirements in 2022 compared with 73% in 2015 (a 14% increase), which is inclusive of companies that used both a guideline-dependent policy and a stand-alone policy together.

– Liz Dunshee